Getting Too Old For This 2: Electric Boogaloo
by ManMadeOfLasers
Summary: A continuation of the story begun in Getting Too Old For This. Harry Potter is back, and he is determined to use that whole 'Preparing for the Reaper War' thing as an excuse to cause as much trouble as he reasonably can. When enigmatic aliens from an unexplored region of space pop up and attack his latest home, he's got a new distraction. Rated 'M' for bad language and worse ideas.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

* * *

**Sigurd's Cradle, Padovan cluster, Freedom's Progress, Outskirts of capital settlement – 05.06.2185**

A hale, hearty, and massively annoyed man sits in the cockpit of a spaceship.

Not altogether unusual. It's a big universe after all, trillions of intelligent lifeforms on hundreds of planets ride spaceships between stars all the time, and given the nature of intelligence (what with how much time it tends to spend angry at the slightest thing) it's entirely unsurprising that more than a few would be male, piloting a ship, and a bit cheesed off.

This sight in particular was at least a little unique though, after all, how many of those ships are bigger on the inside than on the outside, pack mass drivers able to punch a hole through a medium sized moon, and were cleverly concealed inside a perfectly scaled and waterproofed paper-maché hill?

Harry had never been very good at camouflage. Being spoiled in his youth by having a mystical invisibility cloak taken from death itself meant that when the time came to stand and deliver, or rather hold one's breath and hide in a convenient maintenance closet, he had found himself woefully under-prepared.

Conversely, from his many years preparing award winning rose garden arrangements for his aunt, he had developed a lot of skill in gardening and basic arts and crafts. It was only in his early 90s that he learned how to augment his lack of ability in one with his weird proficiency in the other.

"It's releasing... bugs?"

Harry turned to the Asari next to him, struggling for a hold on his temper, "Bugs? I... what?"

The monogender pushed her data to the screens Harry was using, and views that had been filled by charge levels and connectivity to his servers back in the house were replaced with scrawling sensor data. The massive asteroid with engines grafted on was hovering above the colonial capital settlement of Freedom's Progress (a city imaginatively named Freedom's Progress) and all along its bottom-most edge massive panels had retracted, releasing millions upon millions of bugs. Vast swarms darkened the sky as they flew down into the colony.

It hadn't been hard to figure out that the ship was hostile. It shot down all the deep space comm arrays on it's way in, and then all satellites in orbit as it arrived. In Harry's studied opinion that was nothing if not a dead giveaway. But seriously, for all the effort of securing his compound, assembling his temporary crew, and rushing flight prep for his ship, Harry had honestly expected something better. For all his effort he wanted something considerably more exciting than a cloud of midges with attitude.

"What are they doing?"

Liara had busied herself collecting data from sources inside the city. Cameras from weather stations, stolen access to traffic monitors, and even webcam feeds from the less productive but more risqué members of the local population, flitted across her station.

Harry pulled up his own feeds, mostly stolen from the local garrison's 'closed' network. Magic was great for opening doors into those delightfully misnamed 'unhackable' closed systems. Though in fairness to overall Alliance operational security, the local 'garrison' barely qualified for the name, and had the hardware to prove it. With just over a million people, Freedom's Progress was definitely a minor colony resting on an otherwise entirely unremarkable world. The average iron-rich asteroid was a more lucrative target for all but the most bloody thirsty pirates. The entire defensive complement consisted of one under-strength battalion of bored marines and a standard set of automated anti-orbital guns pointed in a generally skyward direction. Guns which had each disappeared in a blaze of high-precision kinetic glory just a few hours earlier that afternoon.

The marines were still scrambling for a proper response, and from all of the yelling and ordering about Harry got the distinct sense that they knew they were out of their depth, _and_ that they knew something about this situation that he didn't.

Frowning, Harry thought longingly of the intel access and active system alerts he would have had forwarded to him if he had retained his Spectre status. Without the important information being flagged for his attention he was reduced to pulling encrypted files from their servers more or less at random, and tasking the server farm on his homestead with cracking it. Cracking the info took time, and time was regrettably finite, even for him.

He watched the security feeds idly as techs backed up all the sensor data they had as redundantly as possible. As they finished putting sensor logs and reports on external media they passed the drives and OSDs to waiting lines of grunts, who were hiding them across the base in secure storage, personal lockers, and even in the glove compartments of nearby vehicles.

They knew they were going to lose so they were trying to save data?

Harry directed his basement to look into that neat little mess, and turned to his combination co-pilot and intelligence analyst. God damn he missed military funding.

"Anything?"

Liara pushed more content to his screens without looking, forcing Harry's gaze back to his own terminal, "They're some kind of stasis bugs?"

The question was obvious in her tone, though Harry took it to be more confusion than outright disbelief, and looking at the footage she had passed across to him, he discovered he fell into the second category.

"What?"

A weather camera looked out over the Governor's Plaza in front of the capitol building, and it showed bugs latching on to stragglers that hadn't made it into shelters. They landed on their victims releasing a cloud of gas and a visible mass effect field, and the result was people frozen in place, in some cases almost exactly like a body bind curse with limbs frozen mid-movement, locked in place in defiance of gravity.

Harry didn't like any part of this.

"Okay, can you get a firing solution up? I'm turning us around."

Liara cleared her console with a gesture and brought up the gunnery controls for the main mass driver, while Harry switched his controls over to maneuvering. Mass effect cores across the inside of the ship lit up, and with somewhat jerking movements, the ship rose a meter off the ground of the makeshift hangar and rotated to face the hovering behemoth casting a shadow over the city.

"We're aligned, you got something for me?"

Harry's eyes were locked on his readouts, constantly making minor adjustments to keep them more or less on target, Liara's voice passed over his shoulder, "Give me a minute, there's something odd in the system."

Harry idly activated a comm line, and called out to his only other crew member, "Tali, how's it looking? Can you double check the main gun?"

Her synthesized growl met his question, driving a wedge of amusement into his anger as she responded, "You bosh'tet! What have I been telling you for weeks! We need a shakedown run, but no, your 'magic' " Harry could feel her delightful three fingered air quotes from all the way down in engineering, "says everything should be fine!"

"Just run a diagnostic on the weapon systems."

There was beat of silence, Harry corrected a half a degree for target drift, and then Liara spoke up.

"Wait, it's not an error, it's your safety. It's not letting us destroy it."

Tali piped up over the comm, "Agreed, I'm not turning up any errors down here."

As they spoke bugs continued to pour from the enemy ship, blanketing the colony. What few signals they were receiving from the colony died to just above nothing, and Harry's mind raced.

"The safety won't fire if the shot will hit and kill civilians. It takes into account piercing, but shouldn't consider the ship crashing. Check my sensor sweep, there's nothing behind it right?"

Liara sent another query to the ship's sensors, and double checked with reports from the colony's automated traffic control systems, "I've got nothing, it seems clear."

The hovering ship was clearly aggressive, it should have satisfied every condition Harry had set into the weapon system to make sure his couldn't mis-tap a control and find himself with a Tier I violation of the Citadel Convention on Weapons of Mass Destruction, and a hole in the nearest planet's crust.

In this case there was no reason the enchantments should be holding them back.

"Run a life signs scan."

Beyond his sight the Asari scowled as she brought up the scanner, "This is idiotic and impossible."

Harry cracked a grin, "You were the one who insisted we watch 'old earth classic science fiction', you gave me the idea, you should be expecting this stuff by now."

Liara's general disgust did not abate as the scan began, "You'll have to forgive me for a century of living not preparing me for a box you stenciled '_hominem revelio_' on destroying everything I know about the limits of modern sensor technology."

Her gasp at the completed scan drew his attention from keeping the gun aligned, turning from his display he looked over her shoulder.

He didn't like what he saw.

"It's beyond that thing's sensitivity, there have to be more than half a million of them in there. A lot more."

The ship was lit up from the inside, like an x-ray view of some perverse bee hive, revealing what the safety wards interpreted as civilians stashed in a honeycomb over the inside of the whole ship, stem to stern.

"How is that even possible?"

Tali must have had Liara's station repeated for her in engineering, her voice sounded over the radio and broke Harry from his shock.

"I... where did they even get that many people? How have we not heard of this?"

He sat back into his chair, correcting the positioning again, letting them all have some time to absorb what they had in front of them. Before their eyes the ship touched down on the outskirts of the colony, dwarfing the build-up of pre-fab structures and newer ceramacrete buildings. The captain of the enemy ship had evidently met whatever condition they were looking for, and an idle glance at the local comm net gave him an idea what that condition was.

Zero chatter.

They got everyone.

As it settled, the cameras they had feeds from showed hatches opening and hundreds of humanoid insects getting off. They weren't affected by the swarms of flying stasis bugs, which showed an impressive degree of control over such tiny life forms, and between two of every three pairs of humanoid figures there floated some kind of terrifying organic coffin.

As an army marched into the city, the settlement's automated traffic control flared warnings, distracting Liara from the hostile forces spreading out onto the streets of the city. Something with the mass of a standard air car was emerging from an opening, higher up on the ship.

The figure had an odd radar profile, and was outside the range of their cameras. The ship naturally had better sensors than the local traffic control grid, but anything more intense than standard radar would broadcast their location like they lit off a beacon. So they had to wait until the huge form landed near one of the first colonial bunkers to get a good look at it, and it did not disappoint.

It was huge and just as insectoid as the rest of its friends, like a scarab designed by an Egyptian god, mad with cybernetic power. It stood two and a half meters at the shoulder and was covered in armored plate, each of its four limbs ending in a wickedly sharp claw.

They watched helplessly as the thing walked slowly up to the bunker entrance, standing in front of it and making short, jerky movements back and forth. Scanning? Deciding on the correct action? Taking orders? With just seconds of build-up, it unleashed some kind of energy beam or particle cannon at the door, burning a huge hole through the reinforced ablative plating of the bunker. Before the edge of the hole could even cool to a dull red, a swarm of flying bastards were already rushing into the shelter.

Within moments, it was clear what they were doing here, and how they came across the incredible mass of life-forms in their hold. The humanoids began packing the first people they encountered into the coffins, and walking them directly back to the ship.

Kidnapping, even the aliens.

"Give me a firing solution on just the engines. Whatever these things are, they're not leaving this planet until I've had words with them."

With a quiet huff at the melodrama, Liara refined her targeting solution. A forward-facing point defense laser burned a hole into their cover, and the massive barrel of the main rail gun poked through their camouflage façade, the barrel appearing suddenly in a rather sheer valley wall. She went to inform Harry but before she could get a word out, he got there first.

Stabbing the control viciously he said, "Fire."

/ - /

There was darkness.

Then, there was panic.

Brief panic, but panic nonetheless.

Gravity stuttered around her. She felt a pull in a direction she labeled 'down', towards her feet, but as her brain switched from unconscious to conscious the pull flickered. Her stomach churned as different forces pulled her away from just 'down' toward odd angles all around her. The forces fought one another, pulsing on and off for a few seconds and stretching her skin uncomfortably, cracking her back for her. Intense vibrations wracked her world, bouncing from the formless black around her and inside her head, leaving her stunned and weirdly grateful for the relief of the tension in her back.

Almost as soon as it had begun, dragging her from slumber, it was over. She was left alone in the dark with echos of an inhuman noise fading into the nothingness around her.

As her world returned to silence she came back to herself, remembering who she was, and with that the adrenaline receded. She'd done the blind thing before during training, and for a while in her youth she'd done the panic thing. Then she left the Reds, joined the marines, and survived N-school, Harry Potter, and the invasion of Ilos. Now, at the other end of it all, panic no longer meant the same thing. You had to pass a very high threshold in order to freak her out. So why was she freaked out?

It was still dark for one, which was odd given that she had her eyes open and she had passed an eye exam just a few months ago

She tried to raise a hand to her head, but only moved her hand a few inches before she hit some kind of hard casing, or paneling, or something. Realizing that she was confined shot adrenaline right back into her system, and she immediately began feeling around, mapping out her environment.

She was in a coffin.

From the inside there weren't any buttons or levers or obvious touch interfaces. The surface she was laying against had a series of strangely organic curves to it, each curve mapping out a sinuous figure that didn't speak to her of anything. They didn't seem to serve a purpose, so she discarded them and moved on. The top of the coffin was lined with ports of some kind and again on the bottom there were more, maybe to let things in and maybe to let things out. She had no idea, but she didn't like it, whatever it was for.

She laid back and took a calming breath. A few meditative breaths determined that air wasn't going to be a problem, even after her first few moments following waking it was still relatively clean. She took stock. The darkness hadn't abated in the slightest, she couldn't smell any kind of chemical traces, there didn't seem to be any significant trigger for her to have woken up other than the shaking. Probably power loss then, either from some kind of mass effect stasis field, or from some chemical pump losing it's juice. Battle damage, then? An especially hard landing at some slave market? Pirates weren't known for their exacting drive core maintenance.

She didn't have a gun, and the hard shell of her armor has been stripped off at some point, but she was still wearing the flexible insert. Her omni-tool was still with her, but whoever caught her seemed to have taken her power cell and omni-gel reservoir.

If her captors hadn't been thorough and discharged the active reserve there might be enough juice left in the system and its capacitors to give her a few moments of flashlight, but that was about it.

Jane sighed, and took another breath. Nothing was impossible, she had seen proof of it. She had lived it more than anyone had any right to. She'd already woken up somehow, so she was already halfway out of whatever this was.

Shifting slightly, she banged her shin against the wall and caught the dull clack she was looking for. So they kidnapped her, took her armor and her guns, but didn't find the ceramic punch dagger beneath her under-layer.

Interesting.

She had a spare power cell and her own lesser version of a Potter special omni-gel reserve in her boot. Neither were large enough to do anything _really_ fun, but the cell had enough power to flash form as many omni-blades as she could possibly need and the reserve had enough gel to kill everything between her and a gun. Maybe even _two_ guns. Now she just had to take her pants and shoes off inside a coffin, and hope whoever took her had been consistent in their negligence.

As she worked, a part of her was worried that she couldn't remember being taken, or indeed anything about how she got here. She and Ash had been reassigned after Ilos and the Citadel, they had been called in, debriefed, given medical exams, and then the whole crew had been reassigned.

The Normandy dropped them all off at their new postings before taking the engineering crew, Joker, Kaiden, and the P5 analysts who hadn't been sent off to the ends of Alliance space, back to an R&D facility at Arcturus Prime. She and Ash ended up together protecting a literally nameless colony out in the traverse.

Official records had it with some kind of binary code an Alliance supercomputer had spun off when it was first observed, P3W-451, but the locals who had set up a city there had called it Dust. It earned its name.

She had taken command of the Alliance's token advisory company, and Ash joined in as one of the platoon commanders. The two of them had been forced into the mostly unwelcome position of being the liaison to the scattered local government. As more people showed up they gave advice on how to lay out the rough cities and utilities in such a way that a pirate couldn't cripple the entire planet's infrastructure from orbit with a handful of shots. Advice which had been poorly received and almost immediately ignored. Two years of banging their heads against sand dunes populated by idiots, lately just trying to convince them that preparing larger panic shelters for the colony was a good idea.

Then... nothing?

It had to be Batarians again. Fucking Batarians. It was really, _really_ hard not to be racist when nearly every one you've ever met had literally been trying to either shoot or enslave you. Call it sampling bias, but she'd been causing trouble in the wider galaxy for around a decade, and she had never met a Batarian doctor, or a social worker, or even a florist. It was slaving and smuggling from hell to breakfast with those people, and they also had a bad history of picking methods of incapacitation that left behind amnesia and central nervous system damage. Probably why she couldn't recall getting captured.

When she finally slotted the power cell in, she powered on the omni-tool and took stock of her situation, running every scan she could on her surroundings. She was _not_ a tech, but she did have a Potter Mark II, so she was still able to get something from the data. Scans showed she was surrounded by a shell made of metal-rich high molecular weight keratin.

Which didn't mean a hell of a lot to her.

In point of fact it meant nothing. Keratin was hair, wasn't it?

What it did say was that she could cut her way out.

With a familiar gesture, her omni-blade formed next to her thigh, bleeding off an unholy amount of heat and singeing her through her underlay. With a grimace, she drew the blade up, drawing a clean slice through the container.

Very dim orange light streamed in through the slit opening she made, the hideous smell of burning hair in her pod was quickly replaced by a distant stench of decay. Drawing her blade back in, and quirking her elbow as far up and to the side as she could, she drew a flat slice across the front of the pod, shearing a short window out of the lid.

Sticking her head out, she took a look around. As the sound of retching (_someone's_ stomach couldn't take grav disruptions) filled her ears, she instantly realized one very important thing: It wasn't the fucking Batarians.

Her pod was mounted vertically, inset into a support pillar directly alongside six others. Her view opened directly into a corridor which opened to her left, and above into a massive cavern. All around her she could see pods, caskets, like the one she was peeking out of. The cavern must have been the better part of a kilometer wide, maybe a klick and a half long, and as far as she could see it was absolutely covered in pods. Stretching across the expanse were stalactite formations, each of which was also covered in pods.

If her pod was just a square meter or so in footprint, some very unqualified napkin math suggested there might be a couple million people here.

Maybe more.

The orange light was brighter outside her tube, consistent despite the flickering power she could see in the pods and control panels near her. Jane didn't consider herself a navy woman, and certainly not a ship-wright, but she was confident the power issues were due to the massive gaping hole in the end of the ship. A ten meter wide hole shot straight through to a fifty meter wide exit-wound on the opposite side, a low wind pushed slowly 'down' from the damage to where she was, playing through her sweat-stuck hair.

Okay. She was alive, she had an active omni-blade, and the pod next to hers was finished retching and had moved on to moaning. From waking up to rescuing a person who wasn't actively vomiting, it was all positive. Hell, the wind and the lack of choking on her part even meant they had landed, with a glance up to the gigantic hull breach, that was probably _crash_ landed on a life-supporting planet. Things were increasing, getting better step by step.

Hell, this could make for a fun and diverting afternoon.

Igniting her omni-blade again, Jane cut a shallow slice off the top of the groaning pod, opening it to the air with a _whuff_.

The timbre of the groan took on a nasal-y cast, an all too familiar nasal-y cast, a voice she had been dearly hoping to never have to hear again. Why couldn't it have been Batarians? The Batarians would have just shot him.

There, before her very eyes, was Lucius Octavius Phelonius III. Self-described restaurateur, raconteur, and post-revival electro-operanteur. Regrettably the most technically inclined settler of P3W-451, he had been the technical contact for setting up the Alliance's proposed detection nets, surface-to-space guns, and defensive installation communication infrastructure, also he was a hideous and persistent pain in everyone's ass.

It fucking figured.

He sat up, poking his head out of the hole, and took a deep breath of the cleaner air outside his pod. The contents of his stomach were spread across his artsy shirt (faux-crocodile skin in highlighter yellow?), pooling in small catches across his rumpled jacket (a classical opera long-tailed coat, done in a faux-crocodile banana yellow?).

"Oh god, what year is it?"

Jane stared daggers at him, cursing her fortune, "2185, probably."

"Thank god, I thought I was back in art school."

This reflected very poorly, Jane thought, on both N school and art school.

"Where the hell am I?"

"We've been captured, some kind of power surge or something cut off whatever was keeping us under. I broke free and heard… that," she said, with a vague gesture at his state.

He seemed to look down for the first time, noticing his state as the caught pools of his own vomit shifted and ran down his front. With a jolt he sprang up, only to smack his lower body directly against the razor sharp lid of his pod, effectively shearing his shirt off at the midriff. The edge, severed and burnt by an omni-blade, scored a line across his stomach and shattered, leaving a dull charred surface.

He lay over the edge of his pod, groaning. Raising his eyes he seemed to really look at Jane for the first time, "Why aren't you wearing pants?"

/ - /

At the edge of Freedom's Progress a small hill, which had just shown up one fine winter morning about eighteen months ago, decided that it had enough of this regrettable physical existence and promptly blew itself to pieces. The shock wave of a fifteen kilogram slug accelerating very suddenly into the neighborhood of Mach 20 devastated the half of the hill facing the city, one edge catching fire briefly, and in the space of 90 seconds where once stood a proud make-out spot for horny teenagers, now flew a medium-sized frigate.

Built in the form of the illustrious SSV Normandy, the frigate deviated slightly from the original design. There were structures on it that hadn't been included in the original design, slim-profile domed pods under each 'wing' and on the top and bottom of the fuselage, dense and unconcealed clusters of GARDIAN laser defense projectors, and a sleek gunmetal blue on grey paint job. There were also some structures that had been removed from the original design, including the pyramidal 'tail fin' structure, which Harry had described as 'lame' during the design phase of his own vessel.

"Decisions, decisions…"

"Oh don't be dramatic, Tali and I didn't spend three weeks installing rail turrets in the wings for you to sit there and try to look cool while bugs kidnap a bunch of idiot colonists!"

From the active comm link in his console Tali's tinny voice chimed in with a "Yeah!"

Harry reflected that perhaps he should have done more direct, combat-oriented, engineering work on the ship. If only so they didn't shout that at him every time he wanted to enjoy himself while they shared these tense moments moving forward. Long term, this would lead to a place where he'd be _their_ comedic set-piece, and that just wouldn't do. He was both captain and wizard, he suffered the company of others almost exclusively so he could make jokes about them.

It was overall a good thing then, that he had been hard at work on a project of his own while they had overseen installation and calibration of the pairs of twin-linked rail turrets under slung on each 'wing'.

"Well. If you insist."

He could feel the reverb of Tali's growl in his seat, which not only made him smile, but also told him installing speakers beneath the pilot's seat was as great of an idea as he thought it would be. With a very pointed motion, Harry selected a file from the menu he had been trawling through and then cleared his terminal, readying the flight controls for sustained hovering and fire-support.

"Confirm turret readiness."

"I have green across the board."

From behind him Liara agreed with a, "Confirmed".

With careful, deliberate moves, Harry guided his ship up from where it had been idling. His specific piloting expertise was more in the 'small one-manned fighter' range, so a vehicle massing around 45,000 long tons was a few steps up from his experience. He checked and re-checked all of his moves, and even then as the ship rose past the height of the capitol building, there was some minor-to-significant wiggle along the roll axis. The flight engines along both sides flared inconsistently before settling into a low and steady burn.

Across the hull, in strategically located areas selected not only for being out of common firing lines but also for their irrelevance to the structural integrity of the ship, panels withdrew, exposing three hundred-fifty kilowatts of the finest speakers and subs Harry could rig into a functional sound system without his two nosy compatriots being aware.

As the frigate took flight the first strains of Ride of the Valkyries, performed by the First Elysian Orchestra at the Grand Opera Hall of Illyria in the spring of 2174, began to play.

It had been a good concert, Harry had discretely donated some of the principle funding to get the orchestra off the ground, Jon Grissom, for all his normal reclusive and anti-social tendencies, had covered most of the rest.

Now, instruments made on humanity's oldest colony could begin to strike fear into the hearts of thousands of alien bastard kidnappers.

Or they would have, if the alien bastards felt fear as a human would recognize the emotion or indeed if they had hearts in the way a human would conceive of the organ.

Okay, so it really just confused the aliens, and the immense pressure of the amped up speakers played merry hell with the flight patterns of nearby flying swarmers.

/ - /

"**I JUST DON'T KNOW!"**

"**WELL SHUT UP AND TRY SOMETHING ELSE YOU FUCKING NERD**!"

"-_jesus christ fuck what the fuck stop it jesus why-"_

Jane fired her purloined heavy rifle blindly around the edge of a pod, wincing with every returned round that impacted her cover. From inside her cover a man shouted and beat his fists against the wall of his pod, invoking his god and asking a pretty genuine question. Why indeed.

Jane just wanted his stupid muffled voice to stop shouting, it was seriously damaging her calm. She wanted him out of there probably as much as he did, the air in those pods must have been getting thin, and if any of the idiots she had freed were going to survive, they needed people that could thump as loud as this guy, ideally with guns in their hands.

The shot that caused the power shortage releasing her, had cored the main generator from the ship. No main power meant disruptions to primary control, and disruptions to primary control meant no life support, and no life support meant that the million-or-so souls stuck in pods over the ship were all down to whatever air was in their local systems, nothing else. On Alliance ships they typically had decentralized back-ups for just this occasion, but their kidnappers had either bad engineers, or no strong desire to keep their hostages alive. Maybe both.

In a horrifying way, the shots penetrating the coffin she was using for cover almost made things better for him, at least he was no longer suffocating, but ultimately no one wanted to choose between getting shot to death inside a hair-coffin and suffocating. Jane couldn't help but wince at every hit.

The main halls of the ship weren't doing especially better in terms of life support. No forced air circulation in an enclosed area of more than five cubic kilometers, other than the ten _meter_ hole in the side, meant that air was slowly becoming an issue even for her rag-tag group of escapees outside their gross prisons.

Every man, woman, and the singular Asari, with her was covered in sweat. The air was only getting muggier where they were fighting, in the bottom half of the ship.

From across the hall what had to be a member of some colonial militia was firing with her down the hall. He scored kill shots on three of the advancing four-eyed bastards before ducking back into full cover. He was a bear of a man, nearly two meters tall, muscled like a Krogan, pushing a hundred kilos if he was an ounce, and chest hair like shag carpet. Jane could see his breathing becoming more labored as time went on, and not just because of the fighting. Dark sweat stained the grey coveralls across his whole back, and down from each armpit.

They needed to jump-start secondary power, restoring it from whatever the surge from the death of the main power had done. They needed to do it soon.

It all left them here, in the nearest thing they could find to an engineering substation, with a hipster DJ trying to hack a computer system from a species none of them had ever seen before, in a language that wasn't in anyone's universal translator.

"**WELL LUCY? WHATS IT GONNA BE?"**

"**DON'T FUCKING CALL ME LUCY YOU CUNT!"**

_Ooof, ouch, my feelings_, Jane thought. Risking a glance just around the corner, she fired wildly into a cluster of bug men advancing from out of her huge friend's line of sight. The Revenant was the kind of gun Wrex would carry two of into battle, but in her hands it kicked like an Elcor. She couldn't hit anything reliably, but she could lay down some very serious suppressing fire. The bug menace didn't seem to mind throwing bodies at a problem, but they did have just enough of a survival instinct to not walk into her line of fire.

"Fucking fine, I'll do it myself," she grumbled, mostly to herself.

Turning from the hall she whistled to Bear, whose name she really needed to figure out. He looked over and she hefted her rifle up, miming a throw to him. He looked uncertain about the trade, the M-27 Scimitar looking very comfortable in his large hands, but at her pleading gaze he nodded. She raised one finger, two, and three, then they tossed their guns across to each other.

The fire coming from the hall in front of them seemed to double as the bugs saw the flying guns and noticed the lack of return fire. He stuck the barrel around the edge, squeezing the trigger and grimacing at the kick, but putting seven hundred rounds a minute downrange. Jane nodded to herself, satisfied with his immediate impact on the firefight.

Turning to the ineffectual techie next to her, she poked his shoulder as she leaned in close to be heard without shouting.

"Do you have anything?"

"**YOU KNOW I DON'T!"**

He had the translation suite of her Potter Mk. II open, and was trying to get any of the tall curving characters to make sense. The alien, presumably engineering, screen didn't have anything she could recognize as a file system, or functional icons. There weren't tabs she could see, or any kind of readily identifiable menu. There also seemed to be three holo-keyboards, each an irregular shape of tessellated hexagons.

They were getting nowhere slowly, and at this point it was likely that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people had already suffocated to death in the pods. They only had a handful of breathing masks to pass around, enough to give every group of fighters one to share, hers currently rested on the face of a worthless hipster.

"New plan! Take this!," she said, thrusting the shotgun into his chest, "Fire it down the hall over there, point it in the general direction of the enemy and fire it sparingly so it doesn't overheat. We don't have any more thermal clips for you, so you'll have to wait for it to cool down when it overheats. Trigger here," she indicated on the rifle, "Shooty end here, don't die, GO!"

She hauled him to his feet and thrust him towards her former position, she could see Bear's unhappy expression intensify as he picked up on the situation.

Lucius held the gun in his hands as if it was some kind of poisonous snake, nearly dropping it as a fresh barrage slammed into the pod he was now taking cover behind.

"**NOW YOU BITCH!"**

"-_fucking shoot what the fuck and get me out of here oh god why have you forsake-"_

He glared at her, and then at the criticism coming at him from the pod, but when he looked back to her face he seemed to think better of whatever sass had been floating through his mind. She had threatened to shoot him back when they were merely unhappy coworkers on a backwater planet, he recognized with great clarity that, in that moment, the murder in here eyes wasn't reserved exclusively for the enemy.

As he began gingerly firing down the corridor, if there were such a thing, she squatted in front of the console trying once again to make sense of the system in front of her. Closing the translation suite, she paged through the programs on the omni-tool, praying for a miracle. She knew Harry had customized her unit a bit, he mentioned using hers as a kind of test bed for the enhancements that he planned for the Mk. IIIs he had on the drawing board before they separated. Even as a test bed it was leagues ahead of any conventional model, but she absolutely did not understand what all it could do, which was why when she saw a program called ' ', she activated it at random and hoped for the best.

As the buzzing from down the hallway intensified, and they lost the Asari who had been acting as a marksman with their one scavenged sniper rifle, a window appeared:

**An update is available for , download the update from a secured network? [Y/N]**

She hit Y repeatedly, and began scanning the nearby area for something she could shoot with. A progress bar began loading on the holo-screen, and with one eye on it she began actively scavenging.

All over the alien ship they had encountered piles of… refuse. The bugs clearly had about as much use for Citadel standard tech as they did for Citadel standard species, which was to say none at all. Weapons were intermixed randomly into piles of clothing, random omni-tools, and in one terrifying case, a small pile of raw unrefined eezo.

Piles of discarded material lay near the occasional suspiciously empty pod, perhaps one in thirty. They each raised the terrible question of what had happened to the people that the gear had belonged to, and who the previous inhabitants of the empty pods had been. More than being embedded in the walls, the pods also lay around in the hallways and rooms. Better than fifty were stored in open floor space in this secondary engineering center alone. It had been a running firefight just to get here, an area which they had identified only by the number of consoles and pipes either passing through or terminating in the room.

Scrambling across the room as the bar loaded on her wrist, she seized a bulky SMG half-hidden underneath a pair of overalls. Weapon in hand, feeling fractionally safer, she crouched back next to the weird console and checked progress.

Some kind of cute animated animal she had never seen before was on the screen bouncing in place. A speech bubble next to it read,

"You look like you're trying to hack an unknown alien's control system to re-establish power, would you like some help with that?"

Below that she had:

• **Get help with re-establishing local power.**

• **Just hack the system on your own. **

**Don't show this kind of tip again.**

Easy choice, she stabbed 'Get help' so fast that she overrode the haptic input in her omni-tool and caused the feedback sensor embedded in her finger to spazz out. A terminal opened on the screen, establishing a signal to a local installation, and shortly thereafter unfamiliar code began scrawling down her screen. The weird animated animal thing began performing some kind of quick back-flip in place, an idle animation of some kind. It didn't help anything, but she sucked on her finger as the program did it's business, trying to ward off the stinging.

Two of the three hex-keyboards in front of her began lighting up, and what looked like system diagrams began flickering by at a bewildering pace. Jane was lost instantly, more beyond her depth now than before her wrist had started taking control of an alien computer system. She took a look up, Bear was openly snarling as he fired, a fresh wound on his shoulder from where he had taken a very near miss. Lucius was openly crying as he pointed the shotgun vaguely towards the ever-encroaching bugs and pulling the trigger uselessly. The gun had long since overheated, but through his tears and all of the blood on his face which he'd acquired during their run through the ship, he didn't notice.

She stepped behind the crying man, and summarily pistol whipped the back of his head. Quickly separating the oxygen mask from him and kicking it over to Bear, Jane felt only a grim sense of rightness. The aspiring operanteur had fallen like the sack of shit he was, she stepped over him and eased her gun around the corner, opening up. The boxy form of her freshly-scavenged Tempest spat fire downrange, helping to cover the blind angle Bear was working against.

Immediately her wrist vibrated, the animated thing stopped jumping and was shaking it's head in a frustrated manner. A marquee flashed in bright red across the bottom of the screen:

**WEAK SIGNAL – MOVE THIS UNIT CLOSER TO TERMINAL**

_Fuck-fuckity-fuckfuckfuck_. She'd just got done pistol whipping the only other person who could cover this angle, useless as he was. Their Asari was down, and the rest of her very limited band of survivors were busy covering the three other doors into this substation. What if she could-

**THIS UNIT MUST REMAIN IN BIOMETRIC CONTACT WITH JANE SHEPARD TO STAY ACTIVE**

That was unhelpful, and more than a bit like mind reading, but it would be very like Potter to throw a security measure like than on the higher functions of her omni-tool so someone couldn't just steal his stuff. She extended her arm as much close as she could to the terminal, still maybe three paces away, and did her best to fire blindly down the hall. Risking a glance away from the firefight towards her wrist, the maybe-rabbit thing (?) was still busily shaking it's head.

_Fuck_. Okay, where did that leave her? No men to spare, no way to hack and keep the corridor covered. In the time it took for her to notice the inappropriately adorable maybe-rabbit and read the message, three buggers had taken cover behind a pod in Bear's blind spot and began firing at her.

She took a step back, keeping her arm outstretched towards the console. Edging the barrel around the edge of her pod, she blind fired towards the enemy. Shots spranged wildly off both her cover, and across the entire enemy sector. Across the room a very human voice cried out in pain.

Jane closed her eyes, growling in frustration and desperation. This was it, make-or-break. Goddammit.

She took a deep breath, and let it go.

She pulled the energy cell from the Tempest, tossing it to the side, and kicked the Scimitar from the ground to her hands. Muscle memory disengaged the automatic firing safety and began the process of overcharging a round. The plasma charge built in the gun, and at the last instant she pulled the thermal clip and shoved the much smaller energy cell into the thermal clip port. Violating every manufacturer safety that had ever existed in the modern small arms industry, she threw the gun into the corridor.

Bear's eyes tracked the gun, and widened. With a strangled cry he fell back into cover.

There was a double bang, one bang on par with a 'carnage' shot almost overlapped by a much louder explosion. The gun itself became an improvised grenade as an energy cell powerful enough to fire sequential electromagnets thousands of times cooked off inside a metal and polymer shell. The shrapnel cleared the immediate area, shredding nearby pods apart and clearing the immediate area of cover.

Bear swallowed visibly, nodding to himself and then leaning back into the corridor, clearing the area of all of the wounded stragglers.

They had a moment, she had a moment, dashing to the side she pressed her omni-tool against the computer control unit and prayed for the best. The console flickered, commands passing across the screen even faster than before.

Gunfire started coming in again from the corridor now guarded only by Bear, his answering fire rang in her ears. Then the maybe-rabbit popped back up on her screen, jumping up and down in visible excitement. A speech bubble popped up next to it.

**Power re-established! Control established!**

**Secure the local area? [Y/N]**

/ - /

In regards to the effective use of aircraft in battle it was said that dog-fighting made excellent movies, but close air support won wars.

In Harry's youth close air support took the form of an enterprising man or woman on a broom, firing downward onto the field of battle, necessarily from within immediate visual range. On good days they may even have had a full wizard's staff to give them a bit more oomph.

These days the scene was a different kind of exercise, even if the basic principles remained the same. Air support from flying-broom to AC130 gunship range was still critical, but it's use was superseded entirely by ship-mounted weapons hundreds to _thousands_ of kilometers up.

There was a new higher ground, as it were.

Despite that fact, and the decades of time and scientific progress separating the fire support experience of Harry's late fifties from current accepted methodology, his general experience with the process remained valid. Close air support was at it's best when it took the form of a well planned and high precision military operation.

Every air mission requires detailed integration between with the close support fire platform and those forces deployed on the ground. Generally that meant communication and sensor integration between ground forces and orbital assets, managed by well defined ground commanders and a fire support controller in orbit.

Ideally, essential fire support tasks are defined ahead of time, enemy air defenses are identified and their suppression pre-planned, friendly forces are positively identified with their general movements and their ingress and egress routes in he area of operation. Gun-target lines are cleared and, eventually, close support is offered from the air.

It is a process defined by it's incredible utility, it's immense risk, and the precision and control required to manage these two factors enough to make it all worth it. Like so many military operations proper execution was long in coming, but fast and vicious in execution.

Now if, for the sake of argument, an experimental frigate with gimbal mounted rail turrets were to have disabled all other starship-grade fire support assets in orbit, taken control of all local colonial security systems and traffic monitoring sensors, integrated life-signs detection into their sensor net, and had a full super-computer server farm managing the operation…

Well, that almost met the standard requirements for a close air support fire mission.

Almost.

Now, further to that point, if the experimental frigate in question was captained by a wizard of immense power and questionable sanity, things began lining up a bit more.

As his cover burned and disintegrated behind him, Harry brought the ship up to two hundred feet and brought it in, over the city. The music blasting from beneath drew the eye of the bugs on the ground and the ire of the two women in the ship. Liara actually moved back from her console, turning her station's chair entirely to face him. Harry could feel the aggression behind her gaze without looking, but he smiled as she paused, her eyes locked on the view of his console over his shoulder.

Across the entire city the unknown aliens had stopped what they were doing to watch the ship pass by. Swarms of the flying bugs that had first appeared made runs at the engine of the ship, probably hoping to clog intakes and bring the ship down, but as they closed the embedded speakers repulsed them with physical waves of force. Flocks continually made runs at engine intakes and sensor pods, trying to force their way into any sensitive surface or inlet. Liara watched all of this with a stony gaze, but at the clouds of swarming hunter-seeker bugs, she seemed to have an epiphany. Turning back to her own console she immediately warmed up the GARDIAN system and set the on-board computers to targeting the harassing swarms as soon as they were ready.

Harry banked his ship over the Governor's Square in front of the capitol building as the final strains of the Ride of the Valkyries filled the air. There was a moment of relative stillness, the frigate above throbbed as it's massive engines kept it afloat, the swarms throbbed in answer as they hesitated to close with so dangerous a foe, and the kidnappers below stood uneasily gazing up at it all. Time stood still.

Just as the swarms got over themselves, just as the ground-pounders readied their weapons, just as the opening notes of _Dies Irae_ from Verdi's _Messa da Requiem _cried out into the stillness, Harry smiled, and the ship's guns spoke.

Eight 15mm rail turrets opened up from the underside of the frigate, stitching fire in dizzy lines across the plaza, chewing up ceramacrete and the bodies of every one of the bipedal bugs that had the misfortune to be standing outside, all with identical ease.

The aliens had been using the south side of the plaza as a temporary collection point for their filled storage coffins. They were piled ten feet high and each was lit from within with a gently pulsing orange glow. A few enterprising buggers ran for the pods, taking cover behind a target that the ship dare not shoot. A bare handful made it, just the one's lucky enough to not get called out as priority targets by the ship's fire control.

Thy fell by the dozen, by the score, all firing wildly up just as the ship thundered down upon them.

From their cover, and in the bare moments they had while exposed, they began taking shots at the ship, their weapons pinging pitifully off the starship's hull. One winged bugger fired a stream of yellow light at them, a continuous particle beam that blackened the frigate's plating wherever it touched, drawing a waving line across the hull to an under-wing turret. The aliens in cover seemed to concentrate fire at the turret, hoping to disable or destroy at least one of the pods which were still picking off anyone who set foot sufficiently far away from the pile of the pods. The turret rocked in it's cradle, until a beam shot caught the barrels, bending one to the side and shearing the other off halfway down it's length.

More infantry charged in, they had been following the movement of the ship as it flew in from the edge of the city, and the tide of bodies rose to fill the courtyard as the first and soon second turrets were disabled. There was no cheering, but they visibly rallied. The chitinous aliens left the cover of the walkways and doorways that lined the plaza, flooding from all directions, many bearing additional beam weapons. The ones who weren't so well equipped stood guard over those that did, interposing themselves between the better equipped aliens and the rail shots aimed for them. It didn't help a lot, there was enough force in each shot to blast clean through even three bodies, but it was enough that the concentrations of beam fire quickly took out three more turrets.

From the north end, from inside the capital building, a different kind of alien appeared. Shaped roughly like the rest of the bipedal ones, it was visibly… changed.

At first glance it seemed to glow from within, but a casual sensor sweep revealed that it wasn't any kind of holographic effect. There was a constant high-level barrier around the new alien, charging through eezo nodes that ran along it's outer carapace like mineral veins. The lighting effects were the vein-nodes running hot, too hot. There was no obvious current source to power the barrier, but it was running so hot along the nodes that it was actually burning off the carapace that lay between the eezo veins.

The new-comer surveyed the field of battle, projecting a sense of command effortlessly without any overt noise or gesture. The beam-bearers near it all wordlessly deferred to it, responding to a wave by charging into the square where they were immediately cut down by a burst from one of the remaining turrets. With a negligent gesture it fired a biotic warp, one so steeped in dark energy that it traveled slowly and was visibly darker than any biotic power Harry had ever seen, up at the frigate hovering above the plaza.

Before the warp bolt had traveled half-way to the frigate, the plaza filled with light. Every GARDIAN projector along the entire lower half of the ship had finally warmed and prepped, and they all fired simultaneously and with pin-point accuracy. The high-intensity lasers reflected and refracted through the smoke and particulate in the air of the plaza, flash-frying every single bug both flying and ground-bound, and disrupting the biotic attack.

The commander held on for an instant longer than the rest, it's eye's flashing defiantly, but that one instant was all it had. The starship-grade laser from the frigate above cut it down just like all the rest.

In the cockpit of the frigate, Harry and Liara both closely examined their sensor readouts. The average air temperature had very briefly jumped twenty degrees, but was already cooling from the sudden burst of energy. The floor of the plaza had been utterly destroyed, stray shots from the rail turrets having over-penetrated targets down to the dirt and gravel under-layer. The pods looked unharmed, but in many cases their outer layers were covered in a fine ash from micro-second exposures of the re-tasked GARDIAN defense systems.

Tali was forwarding increasingly irate reports from engineering as the ship's automated systems performed diagnostics on the turrets that had been ruined by incoming fire. Her reports flashed on-screen alongside the reports generated automatically by the system, insistent reds and yellows filling Harry's console as a living Quarian and the ship's automated digital systems warred for place in the "LIVE FIRE AROUND CIVILIANS IS NEVER AN ACCEPTABLE ENVIRONMENT FOR A WEAPONS TEST" queue.

"Aw, baby," Harry said as he patted the solid presence of the holo-projector in front of him, "But I knew you could do it!"

The color pattern of the report headers grew more aggressive, giving a clear sense of what the system thought of Harry's enthusiastic excess.

"But baby, we have a whole city to cover, at least we know everything works and where the system can use reinforcement now."

Liara audibly growled behind him.

"What? We were supposed to have weeks before we went into proper combat."

Her snarl remained uncharged.

Wasn't it just fascinating how similar Asari facial expressions were to human ones? What were the sheer odds of that, really?

/ - /

Jane Shepard's day was looking up once more! She carried a dead guy's rifle, two dead guys` rifle if you wanted to be technical, and based on the room in the crotch of the greaves she was wearing, she also had a dead man's pants. Thankfully her torso was covered by some gender appropriate armor, but regrettably it too was salvaged from one of the collector's piles of refuse, so it probably had belonged to a now dead woman.

This was becoming a bit morbid. Overall she was pleased! She had armor now, which beat the ever-loving shit out of fighting in her impact-cushioning underlayer.

Restoring power at their happy little substation got them very definitive control over local systems. With the help of her adorable back-flipping VI hacker they were able to seal all of the bulkheads leading immediately into their room. Then local life support kicked in, and the level of O2 in the air rose just as the humidity fell. Most importantly every pod in their sector of the ship had a fresh supply of air.

Bear was still sweating through his jump suit, but now it was a healthier thing. Bear no longer looked like he was actively dying, for one thing, his actively bleeding gunshot wounds aside.

She had said it before this day, and hopefully she would live long enough to give it at least one more go, but they could work with this.

Looking at her collection of resistance fillers, she even believed it. Eleven battle-weary survivors, rescued at random from coffins she had encountered along the way here. She had rescued twenty-eight, originally. She had cut open every pod in her vicinity when she started, "saving" Lucius, and a group who had been caught together in an aircar garage, Skip's Air Garage. Who the hell knew how they had been stored near her. She didn't even recall being caught, let alone willingly being near that hipster fuck, so storage next to some random civvies from a different colony was not out of the question.

It didn't matter, she had freed Bear, his aging uncle who owned the place, their two engineers, and a pair of dumbass teenagers who could barely afford their bodywork with all their money pooled together. They had remembered what drew them together when they were all confronted by one another, Skip had laughed at the rescue, telling the kids they still had to pay.

They had been very, very unprepared for combat.

Jane learned _very_ fast to not try to rescue everyone, but she had poked air holes wherever she could.

Her survivors clustered and put their resources together. An enterprising former aircar engineer distributed a refresh on a home-made inferno ammo mod, and everyone with a sliver of first aid training bandaged their neighbor.

She approached Bear, who sat on some kind of bank of wires getting his arm disinfected and bandaged, "We don't have long, this is their ship, they have to have some kind of workaround we won't spot."

Bear, Michael according to the patch on his coveralls, grunted. When he spoke, a low basso rumbled from deep inside his chest, "I agree of course, yet what can we do about it? I mean no disrespect, you have led us well to get here," he took a deep breath as their temporary medic tied the bandage off tightly, "But it is clear that we do not know where we are or where we are going."

Jane hmphed her agreement.

"I don't have a good command of local systems, so I don't know how far the power we've restored goes. My program can lead us to another substation, and it looks like maybe an armory as well."

Michael took his turn to hmph, "The armory, I would think, and then perhaps we may re-evaluate. I do not know ships this size, but there must be a bridge or command center somewhere. If I ran a ship, I would control armories with more care than engineering backup stations."

"Excellent points," She gave him a very visible look up and down, "You're big and you can shoot, consider yourself deputized. Shout at these," she said, gesturing at the rest of the survivors, "And get them ready to go. I'll go wake the idiot and see if I can't pull any more from the computer."

He grimaced again, stronger then he had when trading for an unfamiliar gun, but he stood and his rumbling voice began gathering their meager personnel and supplies.

Jane walked over to the banana colored pile of dolt. She prodded him with one foot while she tried to find that adorably helpful little animal again, it had disappeared after solving all of her immediate problems, so she naturally missed it immensely. Poking around in , she found exactly nothing helpful. She wouldn't describe herself as any kind of software engineer or coder, but one did not pick up an N7 designation without getting a crash course in a bit of every thing. She needed a working familiarity with computer systems across the galaxy, if nothing else. However the more she looked around more she became convinced that something was very wrong with Harry, or whoever wrote this program.

Options like a 'Plum' or 'More Plums' switch, some sliders that seemed to belong in the character creator of a bad RPG video game, or a series of red buttons labeled 'Summon Monster' with various stylized depictions of vegetables, all abounded. Nothing made sense, which she had missed before in the heat of the moment. She ran through everything she could think of that might lead to a different options menu, or even re-initialize the 'hacking an alien ship' wizard, which had saved her ass.

Feeling like an idiot, and not having any better ideas, she brought her omni-tool to her lips and quietly whispered, "Please help me get to the armory, find the control center, and save everyone from dying from failing life support."

Unable to look at her _idiotic_ last hope for survival, and getting anyone else out of this insectoid hell-hole, she looked down to the unconscious hipster at her feet. Lucius stirred, groaning and clutching the back of his head. His returning to their common consciousness did not stop her from continuing to kick him.

"Hey, Lucy, get up."

"_Uuuugh, dunt cll meh luffy"_

When he started moving with purpose she gave him a minute to get himself together, allowing him to sit up and wipe the drool from his chin while she watched the progress of the rest of her crew, and steadfastly refused to look at her omni-tool. Jesus, what the hell was she doing here? If she got out of this, when she got out of this, she was going to take some classes. Hit the Salarian Learning Annex. Tech had never been her specialty, but she was going to sit Tali down and get some masterclasses in how to get out of thes-

"YOU HIT ME!"

"Uh, no," she replied disinterestedly, someone had kicked over a fresh pile of crap revealing a military bag filled with MREs, Bear, or rather Michael, ran over, "It was probably one of those bug guys."

From the corner of her eye, he didn't look like he was buying it.

"Definitely one of them. Snuck right up on you."

In her attempt to not meet his eyes, she began to play with her omni-tool, where she found good news. On her display lay a rabbit-eared thing, it's fluff concealing it's limbs and forming one coherent, and smug, cotton ball. There was an expression on it's face like it knew a secret, every secret, and it adored that you were slowly figuring that fact out.

A new speech bubble rested above it, "Well, why didn't you say so?"

She tentatively tapped the message, it wasn't highlighted like a link, but that was apparently acknowledgment enough, it's smile widened and it disappeared.

A map of the local area popped up, a path highlighted from their current location to what was clearly labeled 'The Armory'. Local comm protocols opened, sharing the map and route with every omni-tool they had been able to scrabble together for the group.

Smiling, resolute, she turned from the coughing man in a leather suit and moved back to her group. Michael had them in a rough formation, looking almost ready to meet their fates. She stopped in front of them, and at her gaze spines straightened and grips firmed. One man in the back wiped the remains of a chili mac with beef packet from the corner of his mouth. She nodded, and waved them after her.

They stacked up at their exit, heading out one of the smaller doors. At her omni-tool's command the door cracked, and they volleyed fire out into the ranks of buggers in the hallway. The insects had reinforced while the survivors had been holed up, the half dozen that had been trying to break in before Jane took control of local systems had become more than twenty during their respite, but their advantage in numbers meant nothing before the regimented fire of Jane's survivors.

Ugly and crude organic welding gear lay discarded near the door, whatever plan the bugs had for breaching the door were interrupted forever as the survivors streamed in a ragged advance out of the substation and into the hallway. Jane kept their pace rapid, as harsh of an advance as she dared, running through the corridors to keep from being flanked. Bear kept to one side, and Jane the other. They passed cross paths and poured punishing fire into each to suppress any aliens and keep rolling. The others helped where they could, but the mechanics tenacity and Jane's skill anchored their charge.

The armory was two hundred meters along the hull of the ship, but in practical terms was closer to half a kilometer away. They made amazing time, and managed to reach the doors without more casualties. Their blitz carried them into the armory, where the momentum of their advance overwhelmed what passed for a quarter-master among their enemies.

"I want a guard on the door way!" Jane shouted, "I want three of you on those particle rifles, and the rest of you grab anything that looks like Omni-gel or power cells, GO GO GO!"

Michael and his remaining colleague took the doors, each covering half of the corridor. They were clear for the moment but their momentum had been spent reaching the armory, the bugs were sure to be right behind them. Inside the armory Jane watched as her people ran around, flipping open more storage coffins, which seemed to just be how the bugs stored anything of value. Her omni-tool vibrated at her side, and when she checked she discovered that there were oddly specific instructions laid out. She was guided around the room towards the back, behind shelves like bunk beds, filled with more and more storage coffins. From behind her gunfire picked up from the doorway, and she hastened to wherever it was that the cute animal was bringing her.

She was guided to the rear wall, and to a creepy organic safe embedded into it. The fluffy maybe-rabbit was doing back flips again, one tiny arm pointing to the safe.

Shrugging, one ear on the firefight continuing back the way they had come, she lit off her omni-tool blade and sheared off the door to the safe. It seemed to be made of the same chitin that nearly everything in the ship way made of, and it burned away just like the rest.

Inside the secured storage was a weapon that she hadn't seen in ages, something she hadn't seen since N-School. An N7 Piranha with, she counted as she spun the rotating cooling chamber, a full set of thermal clips. It was a peerless shot gun, and as these things went, it wasn't a bad light machine gun. Normally it was about as accurate as spitting, with a similar effective range, but if the extended smart choke on it was what it looked like, this thing was going to lay down fire that would make a Krogan green with envy. The Piranha had been designed for close-in work in the enclosed hallways and cargo areas of boarded ships or pirate strongholds, where rate of fire was king and a suddenly overheating gun was a death sentence.

Instead of answering this design challenge with water-cooling, or standard radiators, or one of those fun new turbo-fan forced convection units the Elcor were using to cool heavy weapon platforms, they decided to hook it to a rotating chamber of thermal clips tied in sequence and processing 'spent` thermal cells in parallel. When one clip begins to approach overheating, the chamber switches over to the next in line for an instant relative cool-down, and the thermal load was shunted around the remaining clips to roughly octuple the relative area over which the heat dissipates.

She could work with this.

She loaded an inferno-modded ammo block, and filled the secondary block slots, for no beast of this pedigree would be sated with merely one source of ammo material. Charging the initial shot, she sprinted back to their front, vaulting through bunks wherever there was space.

She reached the door to the armory as another wave of bugs rushed her defenders, Michael poured fire into the doorway, and as she sprinted towards them, gun up and ready, she saw his trigger finger in a moment of adrenaline driven clarity. His face wide open, hostility and hate and despair writ large across every inch. His teeth bared, his knuckles white, he was pulling the trigger on his Revenant hard enough to bend it inside the trigger guard. On his left a team of three had to volley fire as a unit to even approach his defense. Her blood was filled with fire as she closed with the door and her gun spoke, calling the name of these fucking alien's gods.

Three, hiding just outside of the door's view, flew to pieces at her hands. She clustered shots into the heads of the next pair to the right. She trusted her back to Michael, putting shots carefully into one still in flight, before pulling the trigger and holding it down. The piranha chewed through the last four down that side of the hallway, and their cover.

A squad rounded a corner, coming out of an adjacent hallway just ten meters further down the line. Her smart-choke adjusted automatically and the one in front became shrapnel, it's hard shell joining the pellets that began tearing into the ranks behind him.

She turned, her third heat sink clicking into her fourth, and began filling the other direction, past the doorway junction that led into the armory, with fire. Each resounding thump followed by another, putting inferno rounds down range to her targets at three hundred fifty rounds per minute. Her own triumphant scream matched Michael's before they both ran out of things to shoot_, her _gun finally succumbing to thermal overload and shutting down, the last bug-man long since dead.

The battlefield was a wasteland before her, flaming rounds having laid waste to any possible cover and scorched the hallways black down both directions, clear through to the next intersecting juncture.

She turned back to her people, her crew, her survivors, with a deaths head grin.

"Pack it in people, we're taking this ship!"

A strained Michael took charge again, and under the over watch of what had to be the most expensive gun on the planet he began rounding the people up and distributing the power cells and other supplies they had been able to appropriate. As she swept her gun across the hallway, Jane pulled up her omni-tool again, looking to interface with local systems and see if they couldn't find a path to whatever passed far a CIC here.

She glanced to her display in just enough time to see her animated friend tie on a small skull and crossbones neckerchief. A new alert filled the bottom:

**LOCAL SYSTEMS CONTROL ESTABLISHED**

As she noticed the alert, a fresh speech bubble popped up:

"Yo ho ho! You seem to be engaging in privateering, would you like assistance with that?"

•**Yes!**

•**No!**

While she wasn't sure if this was technically privateering, Jane did know that she would give this little thing her first born if it got her the fuck out of here in a way that didn't kill a million people.

They had been running around and trying to get things going for coming on three hours. Being generous with local system tolerances and their own response to life support going out, there was already a five-figure death toll. The old and infirm would be the first to go, people like Michael would be next, and then the lack of oxygen would work it's way down to every last man, woman, and child.

She stiffened at the thought, dozens of lives, dozens of people with mortgages, and air car troubles, and what would have been tests at fucking school the next day, had all died in the time they were currently taking to shore up resources and get ready for their push to-

Her wrist buzzed insistently at her, the maybe-rabbit shaking it's head with a stern expression. Wincing, she pressed 'Yes!', and breathed deeper as local life support in the area kicked on.

Fuck, that should have been her first priority, not this fucking gun.

A course lit up on her local map, which had expanded upward along the spinal line of the ship, taking her from their newly-secured armory to a large room about another 300 meters further along. The relative top of the room seemed to be flashing an alternating red and white though.

Jan stepped out of the hallway and back into the armory door, checking her troops. One pair seemed to have themselves put together, a heavily mustached man and what appeared to be his waifish girlfriend. Michael was towards the back, helping someone strap more power cells for the beam rifles to himself.

Jane waved the pair to the door, and exited the navigation mode, opening the full map she had available to her. The control center room roof was indeed flashing red and white, as she zoomed out she found that it was at the edge of a cone that covered a lot of territory, all flashing that color. The CIC had been located close to power generation and central engineering, which had all been blown out whenever that shot had cored the ship.

The CIC had been at the extreme edge of the damage zone, and was open to the atmosphere. There was no telling what damage had been done to the room, or if any of the systems in it were still powered or functional.

She tapped her wrist in thought. Tali would know what to do. On the Normandy the bridge was filled with interface terminals… but interface terminals weren't central computing! The Normandy distributed the actual computing power that controlled the ship throughout the ship, which allowed damage control to access and establish positive controls for repairs, as well as assisting in mitigating the damage of a hit to the bridge.

Feeling like a fool again, she leaned down to her omni-tool and whispered, "Can you take control of systems in the bridge even if everything is shot to hell?"

The rabbit's smug grin was everything she had been hoping for, the mini-fabricator in her tool began spinning up production of wireless interface devices they could attach to consoles or individual data lines to create a network that she could at least engage with, and unbidden her navigation suite opened again, bringing her back to the path to the damaged CIC.

An updated was sent out to their salvaged omni-tools, which had multiplied while she hadn't been looking. There was a stock in the armory it seemed.

From across the room Michael's rumbling basso declared, "All is ready!"

"Excellent timing, we have a route. The damage control system is reporting that the CIC was caught at the edge of the blast that cut power, so there will be some damage. I'm sending you all plans for some interface tools that we'll use to establish control when we get there. Set your omni-tools to begin fabricating them while we're going. Everyone has the nav data, Michael and I will take point again."

Getting into his role, Michael shouted, "Move! Line up at the doorway, we move at once!"

Realizing he was getting into his role, he grimaced again. At some point he had switched from the Revenant she had forced him into back to another Scimitar, like what he had started with. Perhaps he thought she had the weight of fire covered, but now was not the time to investigate or yell at him.

They began another blitz through the hallways, Jane's gun decisively ending any arguments that the locals may have had about their trespassing. Three hundred meters wasn't a short run, especially through the winding corridors of the ship, but they made good time. It was do or die, and if they kept running and refused to be pinned down, they couldn't be flanked. The strategy that had gotten them to the armory carried them up and away to the control center.

Perhaps too easily.

They breached the doors to command, and discovered why.

The first thing they noticed was the breeze. The air didn't smell recycled, and it certainly wasn't the muggy nightmare they had been sweating though when they started down below. The roof of the room opened out into the massive damaged cone that had been shot out of the core of the ship. It looked as if god's own cake server had been inserted into the side of the ship, and given a harsh twist. Exposed seams of the rocky outer armor and the underlying steel structure mixed with the organic material that lined the inside of the ship.

It was so vast from side to side that the majority of the interior lay in a shadow cast by the afternoon sun failing to penetrate the interior. The sparks of shorting power lines along both brought flashes of light to the holes in the ship, and the nearest edges of the shadowed cavern. Each spark exposed cut fluid transfer lines, and a hundred honey-comb rooms. Each flash provided just enough illumination to glimpse the incredible power of whatever had run the ship through, and also just enough to reveal that the edges of the wounds were positively crawling with more bugs.

The bipedal ones they were so familiar with were joined by small clouds of swarming flying things, and gigantic tank-like beatles. There had to be twenty-five or thirty of the tanks, and ten times that number of the man sized ones.

Jane immediately halted their advance, and forced the majority of her squad back into the hall, through the door they had forced open. Michael stuck by her side, but physically pushed the others back into the hall, ordering them to kill their lights and focus on covering their backs.

At Jane's fast whisper he began collecting up the interface devices that the squad had been able to put together, before returning to where she was crouched behind what had once been a command console of some kind.

"Not damage control, I think."

His low tone shook her from her thoughts, "You're right. Look at the big ones, they're pulling up sections of plating and moving them around. It looks like they're forting up, and they're all facing the big hole, no one is covering the entrance wound over there."

The beatles were using their wickedly sharp legs to shear off chunks of the steel super structure and they were passing them to the bipeds, who were working in gangs of ten to twenty, moving the chunks into position, making small forts with tens of small openings, apparently for small arms fire.

Michael grunted, before dropping a double-handful of the small flash-formed devices at her feet, "We must focus, if they are not searching for us, all the better. Life support must be restored. I do not know how you are taking over these systems, but take care that you do not restore _their_ communications. It would be unfortunate if they were to hear from their brothers inside that someone was heading to the command center."

"I agree. Here, you take a few and start wiring them to anything that looks important. This place is wrecked worse than I thought, there's no way we're going to get a proper active console in here, even if it wouldn't drag all their attention to us."

He hmmphed agreement, taking a few of the devices, she grabbed the rest and moved quietly off to another important looking piece of wreckage.

The ship had definitely been hit by a huge mass driver. This wreckage pattern looked just like what you would see in a physics textbook, the round had struck on what she was going to call the western side, the impact had blown out a chunk of the armor, leaving a ragged ten meter-ish hole. From there the round broke exactly as it had been intended to, with tungsten carbide fragments blasting forward from the impact point, shredding armor and internals until they impacted the other side of the great open space at the core of the ship. From there the debris from the internal wall and the remains of the frangible round spread out to form the nearly fifty meter exit breach.

But that didn't make sense. There was a reason that you only saw stuff like this in physics textbooks.

Mass driver rounds never fragmented that neatly. Even if they did, the internals of a ships weren't a solid wall of ceramacrete or ballistics gel, they were filled with voids, had armored sections with different impact response characteristics, they were reinforced, or had generators that failed creating secondary explosions. The real world just didn't produce ship damage like this.

The gun that made this shot would have to have the power generation and computing capacity of an entire Citadel ward behind it, it would have to have heat dissipaters the size of a small moon and it would have to have more superconducting mass driver coils it in that any four dreadnoughts, from any species of construction you would care to name. The Destiny Ascension couldn't poke a hole this neat into a ship.

So some weird fuckery had to be afoot. If she was a suspicious person, and she was, she might have suspected that Harry Goddamn Potter was somewhe-

Wait.

She knew that sound.

She wasn't exactly a music buff, but every military band ever has always been fond of any music which could be made to incorporate artillery.

Across the cavern all of the bugs stood to attention, the tank beatles abandoned their work, and the bipeds began clustering behind the ramparts they had been working on. The glittering yellow beams of particle rifles crisscrossed the open space as they test fired and cleared their barrels.

The music seemed to be getting louder, almost too loud. From behind her Lucius craned his neck out from behind the bulkhead.

Jane definitely recognized this, in fact, they were getting very near the finale. Just as orchestra and the horns rose up, the Normandy flew in front of the 'eastern' side of the ship.

No, not the Normandy. It didn't have the distinctive SR1, or the coloration she remembered, and written large across the side was FORTITUDE. It hovered there, back-lit against the sun, and then as the first great crash of the overture sounded everyone opened fire.

Particle beams shot from the cavern, focusing fire on a series of gun pods she definitely didn't remember the Normandy having, and on every engine cowling that they could reach. Their fire blackened the plating, and seemed to rock the ship, but ultimately there was no effect. They must have been inside the shield envelope of the ship, to be hit so directly.

From the Fortitude every GARDIAN emitter with a clean line of sight opened fire at the same time. The lasers were invisible in the first instant, overshadowed by the particle beam fire, but as the first of the ad hoc super-structure fortifications began to ablate and burn away, the vaporized material began to fluoresce in the air, showing the passage of the lasers as they swept across the whole interior of the cavern.

Scores of bipeds were just ashed in the first few seconds, their cover was just… insufficient… when measured against the power of a starship-grade direct energy weapon. And that was when they could take cover from the pinpoint accuracy of the lasers and their targeting system. Then the beatles seemed to reach some kind of critical charge, and began firing their own immense particle beams from their eyes. Their impacts rocked the ship further, one gun pod recessed into the wing, it's gaskets catching fire.

When the particle beam fire stopped, because there stopped being humanoid bug-men to wield them, the tank beatles became the next targets, and in seconds they were nothing more than burned out hulks as well.

Jane peeked over the edge of a console, a very crude flash formed helmet and breather over her face. The flash formed quartzite structure that made up her faceplate gave the whole scene a certain waviness that made the nightmarish scene in front of her hard to make out. With all of deck plate that had boiled away, and with all of the ash from the keratinous walls and people that had done their own boiling, the atmosphere in the cavern had become very suddenly hostile. She and Michael had been able to throw something together to keep going while the holocaust in front of them ran itself out.

A muffled "_EY!_" drew her gaze to Michael, who gestured furiously back at the panel in front of her.

Right. They had a job to do.

She had run through better than half of her wireless connectors, splicing them into the line of any data cable that looked like it connected to something important. None of the cables were colored differently, or marked in any obvious way. Her animated friend was shaking it's head whenever she looked, thought bubbles displaying a series of check marks and red crosses.

It looked like they had control of weapons, and basic security, but they didn't have any lead into the one thing they needed. She pulled a few of her units, losing control of weapons in the process, somehow. This was going nowhere, again. Slowly, again.

She moved down the line to another console, picking new lines and making fresh connections. Still no joy, navigation was pointless when there was no main power in the first place.

The Fortitude rotated in place, bringing the airlock around to face the cavern. A spotlight descended from a recessed position in the airlock doorway, blinking a few times before training itself on their general area, and then focusing down onto a console across the room. The music quieted down, finally, replaced by the comparatively low roar of the engines of the Fortitude in atmosphere.

Jane looked to her compatriot, and in a rush they both stripped every connector they could reach and dashed for the console. They stumbled over each other as they spliced something onto every line they could find, and in a moment there was a soothing tone playing from her omni-tool, where the pirate rabbit-thing stood with a proud smile.

They did it.

They fucking did it.

A great mass of air, from deep in the open core of the ship welled up, pressing against her crude mask.

She closed her eyes, settling against the still sparking console behind her. She removed her helmet, experiencing bliss for one clean moment.

"**Oi**," his annoying ass voice called out to her from across the air between them, nearly washed away by the sounds of the air recyclers compensating for the massive hull breaches that _ofcoursehefuckingcaused_, "**you doing alright over there?**"

"Ugh," she said.

Feeling more than hearing Michael settle down beside her, "I hate him," she said conversationally.

"**Who's the big guy? And who's that fruity looking fellow in the bloody yellow midriff shirt?**"

"God damn you, Harry Potter."

* * *

[A/N]: Well, there you have it. Welcome to **Getting Too Old For This 2: Electric Boogaloo**. I hope you liked this chapter, and found it at least as entertaining as the last story one, if perhaps a bit ruder. I'll tell you this, it was written while considerably more sober than the last one, so make of that what you will I suppose. This story will explore the events of Mass Effect 2, and likely flirt with the events of Mass Effect 3, I haven't defined the cut-off very precisely. It will also capture the principle events that lead to Harry's being kicked off Earth, which will have a very different tone from both the first story and the ME-portions of the story, but I hope you will find it enjoyable all the same.

As always, I can't promise you this will update quickly, but it will update. The bulk of the original story was written under a very different set of personal circumstances, I was in a different place both physically and mentally when I put it together, so writing this comes from a fundamentally different place as a result. My job may be having me travel a lot in the coming months, depending on how some factors which I cannot predict shake out. If that comes about, it will be good news for this story, because I find that hotel rooms and airports make for fantastic places to write. If it does not, then nothing will have changed.

Before the author's ramblings, this chapter weighs in at 14,821 words. As always, I welcome PMs and reviews.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2 - Before Harry Left Earth**

* * *

**Local cluster, Sol System, Earth, London, Foyer of the Ministry of Magic – 07.14.2028**

He was late. It was Friday, he was late, and more than the fact that he was _certain_ his assistant _de jour_ was sitting on his desk with a very disappointed expression on their face, it mean that he had not missed the secretarial pool's mid-morning smoke break.

He skid on his heels out of the fireplace, and with a very practiced motion he vanished the rubber streaks from the marble behind him. Long experience with being horrible at using the flue lead to these little habits, and it lead to a lot of shoe replacements. He ran through heel material like it was no one's business, and while that kept Twilfitt and Tattings in business, it left him with a very tedious monthly trip to their in-house cobbler.

Wait, this was a distraction, he was distracting himself. He could hear the bellowing, the cackling, and the click-click of the stiletto heels through the halls already, and he really needed to spend his next few very precious moments trying to remember the incantation to the disillusionment spell.

His beautiful and incomparable Lilly Luna had taken his cloak this morning, telling him that he didn't need it and also there was a boy that desperately needed to discover that she could reach him at any time, and that he could never hope to escape her tyrannical grasp. While he thought that was a maybe a little crazy, and that they definitely needed to talk about toning it down a bit, he knew better than to get between her and her little projects.

"_Obscuro_!"

His wand fizzled angrily, spitting hot pink sparks.

"_Celatus_!"

Hard won fighting instincts forced him to turn his head at the last second, which allowed the dark green spell to fly from his wand into a man standing behind him. The man, whose back was turned, now had mere moments to realize that his clothing was becoming invisible and not taking him with it.

"_Abditio_!"

The familiar cracked egg feeling covered him from head-to-toe, in just enough time for the horde of men and women, all between the ages of 23 and 34, and terribly, horrifically attractive, to thunder past him to the London exit.

There had been an accident, an unspeakable's experiment had broken through their containment circle, and five levels of ministerial shielding and concealment charms to blow a cloud of volatile beautifying potion that had been converted into an everlasting elixir over the whole of Whitehall, just during morning smoke break hours. The result was a group of supernaturally attractive secretaries, on both sides of the muggle/magical divide, who came back down to work a bit more spiffed up than they had left. Since then there had been any number of scandals, a truly outrageous number of divorces, the muggle Prime Minister had been replaced pending an HR review, and the morning smoke break had been enshrined in gold.

Gossip had never been a more physical force in the building.

More relevant to his immediate circumstances, the number of people with the suicidal desire to hit on him and pinch his bum in defiance of his wife's very public edicts had grown exponentially, and he didn't need another shouting match ending in an atrium fountain cat-fight to cap off his week. Hollyhead Harpies indeed.

With hurried steps he avoided the crowd, the firsts wisps of cigarette smoke flitting away from them before they had even left the building, and snuck his way into a lightly occupied elevator. Pressing the button for the Auror's Offices, he sighed, and canceled his spell.

Two adjuncts to the High Mugwump, blessedly not recipients of the 'Unspeakable Miracle', were in the corner of the elevator speaking in low tones. It wasn't uncommon for politicians or department heads to run around under disillusionment spells, so they were unphased by his phasing back into the visual range.

One of the pair, a nice woman whose name Harry was certain started with an 'E' but for the life of him couldn't recall, offered a kind smile and a, "Long week?"

Harry gave them both a weak smile in return, "It's been a bit of a month, to be honest."

Her partner spoke up, "You're telling me, the latest integration changes have been… a challenge."

Harry shrugged apologetically, "We strive to bring everyone to as even a playing field as we can, but our Irish friends derive their magic from offering questionable deals for gold. We either struggle here, or we have to explain to our muggle friends why the average height of their pay-day lenders fell to just shy of sixty centimeters. This is easier for everyone, believe me."

They both grimaced, but gave understanding nods.

"It's the life of a public servant, yeah? God bless us, but we volunteered for this."

The elevator gave a cheerful _DING!_ and Harry glanced out. His floor.

"Best of luck to you both, and for what it's worth, I am sorry. I worked with the Old Lady as much as I could on it, but they're leprechauns, banking was never going to get out of this one unscathed."

They shared understanding nods again, this time with grins.

"WAIT, DON'T TELL HER I CALLED HER THAT, SHE'LL-"

The doors closed in his face, leaving him to the chuckling behind him in the bullpen. Turning, his gaze tracking over the assembled ranks of his people, "I don't know why any of you are laughing, if she orders the patrol schedules changed again, it's you lot waking up at half-three, not me."

He rode the waves of grumbling cheerfully through his people, shucking his cloak as the press of humanity in the confines of their cubicles drove the temperature past the limits of his clothes' temperature control charm. The grumbling became a dull background buzz as he checked in with his Auror corps in passing as he headed to his office.

Ainesbury was still muddling through last week's concussion, Jimmy Fortescue was handcuffed to his desk half-offering medical assistance, half-offering a statement. Thomas' desk was both festooned with West Ham gear, and empty, so Harry could pretty reasonable expect some soccer hooliganism complaints to cross his desk at some point next week. The usual really, though somewhere in the office someone's better half had baked the most intensely sweet honey-buns he had ever smelled.

The nearly sickly-sweet odor carried him the last few meters to his office door, which was strangely unadorned. The plain polished wood of the door was usually covered by some mark from this week's assistant, a rotating position manned by _a unique _pool of mostly qualified personnel that were funneled through his office by the office of the Minister. The Old Lady was hard on her assistants, though none would say so in earshot of her, so his office served as a kind of lower security, lower stress, halfway house operation. It allowed their small number of trusted staff, essentially the still-living remnants of Dumbledore's Army, a safe place to do useful work between the mindlessness of the normal Ministerial or Wizengamot secretarial pool, and the much higher stress realm of the department heads and the Office of the Minister.

Their generation of Hogwarts graduates all experienced an… interesting… education. Large swathes of standard O.W.L and N.E.W.T material had been negatively affected by the war, or by the Triwizard Tournament, or by the soul-draining aura of a horde of Dementors, or by being stalked through the halls of their learning institution by a magical WMD, or even by that time that the headmaster hid an artifact which could give unlimited wealth and eternal life from a terrorist possessing one of his professors inside the school. Their generation, even those not directly affected by the politics of the war or by the blood-purity sensing abilities of a gigantic snake, had eventually graduated with a skill set that was perhaps more practically focused than the learning outcomes the Wizarding Examinations Authority had established as acceptable pedagogical goals.

Dumbledore's Army, or it's survivors at any rate, had overwhelmingly received torture and PTSD as graduation gifts from their Alma Mater. They had stepped from Hogwarts' Entrance Hall for the last time, moving firmly into the adult world, where the power vacuum left by the war nearly pulled them from their feet. The only positions of social, regulatory, or administrative authority that hadn't been firing spells at them from behind masks a few weeks prior had been shop keepers, janitorial staff, or too old to hold a wand.

The purebloods had spent ten generations stacking the government and the economy in their favor. When Voldemort fell for the final time the Minister of Magic, every ministerial department head, the vast majority of the ministerial support staff, the bulk of the Auror corps, and the top 25% of the most economically active businesses had all been owned or staffed by purebloods. The Sacred Twenty-Eight, the pureblood houses whose work and support had founded and upheld the Ministry of Magic, had become the sacred seven. Voldemort had killed off six of those now lost lines, and the remaining fifteen had all donned the robes and masks of his followers. They had paid the price for it in the final battle.

At the end of the war, Harry and his direct supporters had declared themselves the legitimate government of the land by _fiat. _They gave themselves three days off following the final battle, and then they collected their resources, coordinated with the still-living members of the government, and sent their best and brightest to the ICW to gain an accounting of their foreign obligations, and call for aid.

There were few proper adults, few people over the age of twenty really, that could be trusted. So they collected their resources, collected their people, and took care of business. If doing that meant that they took politically reliable people and cared for them by making them earn their keep as a high-security-clearance secretarial pool, so be it. It had complicated things. They faced very legitimate claims that they were stacking the government with their cronies in the same manner as the purebloods they had ousted.

It made for a complicated political situation, which was thankfully Hermione's problem. All Harry had to do now was look out for his friends and comrades, which had been his great passion and skill going through school anyway. She burned through assistants and earned and spent political capital as fast or slow as she had to. Harry forced her dregs to watch his schedule, take notes for him, and he trusted them to respond appropriately to circumstances in his absence, like he had personally trained each one of them to do. So every week or so he had someone new in his front office to watch his back, and he kept them going, gave them purpose, and they covered him as they all kept the brittle peace they enjoyed intact.

It had been twenty-two years, and the war still hung over many of them. Some days the remnants of that time period still made them feel unsafe, it kept them on their toes, and on this day, the specter of those distant events hung over Harry Potter.

There was more resistance than there should have been when he pushed to open his office door, he only needed a quarter inch to feel it.

That was trouble.

His senses fell back into the familiar grooves, worn deep into his brain by war and an aggressive profession. It was still hot, the buzzing from the bullpen had only grown louder, and that sickly-sweet smell was more intense now than it had ever been. His wand was in his hand before he even registered what was going on.

He pushed the door properly open in a rush, a wide area spell on his lips, he'd cast across his whole office space and knock every unshielded person out as fast as he could. His filing cabinet could be activated to come alive and begin spewing paper into the air to give visual cover and cause confusion, his desk was actually a transfigured bear, one firm _finite_ away from causing trouble for everyone. He also had a juvenile basilisk that Hermione didn't know about and hadn't approved of, resting in stasis in an undetectable expanded region behind the his son's crayon portrait at the rear of his office. Just in case.

He sprang through the half-opened door into the office, landing on a carpet of Rough Bluegrass, grown thick and strong. The floor confused him, drawing his attention from the room downward to the trap he had surely jumped into, so he was surprised by a familiar voice.

"Harry Potter, it's so good to see you, you look well!"

That definitely wasn't his secretary, though it also wasn't unwelcome. Her voice was warm, just like he remembered.

"Luna Lovegood!" Harry said with a smile, "How have you been, you look fantastic!"

She did too. What was once straggly blonde hair had filled out, it had been cut short, and like the rest of her, it looked sun-kissed from time she had clearly spent out in the field. She had grown into what had been too wide eyes, turning what had been an expression of permanent surprise into a face that was obviously accustom to a smile. Her fashion sense had been atrocious as a teenager, but frankly the confidence of being forty-seven, the prime of her life, made it a statement rather than a cry for attention. She truly had grown into herself, the years since their last encounter had been far kinder to her than many of their cohort.

Unfortunately she was not alone in the room.

Luna Lovegood sat, in all her oddness and glory, behind his desk. She was resting her feet on the surface of his desk, a pair of thick Dock Martins obscuring the picture of his family. Across the desk from her sat… Something.

It was a wooden figure in the crude shape of a man, it looked to have been formed by the organic growth of wood so there were knots and holes, leaves in odd places and evidence of trimming in different areas at different times. Vines running all over it's body connected it to the growth of the floor, and as it turned to look at him, it was clear that it was missing nearly a quarter of what would have been it's skull. Revealed by the missing chunk were several layers of honeycomb where it's brain should have been, overflowing with golden honey which leaked off the front of it's body down to his desk and then the floor. Clutched in the better of it's two hands was a teacup.

As he looked again, Luna had one in front of her too.

Harry collected himself in a beat of silence, and deliberately did not drop his wand from where it lay in his hand, still ready to go to work.

"So, Luna dear, who is your friend?"

Luna looked to her companion, whose face creased into a horrific, but very pleased, grin. It's words came slow, ploddingly, like they had to be forced from the thick honey that seemed to make up it's insides.

"I… am Aloysius… Benjamin… Grimmelsby… Lovegood… And I… Am very… Very… Pleased to… Meet you."

"This!," Luna said brightly, "is great-great-grandfather Aloysius, and he and I are here to help you do your job. It's quite important, you know."

Harry uneasily slunk into his other guest chair at her knowing wink. This was weird, but Luna Lovegood was here once more, in his office. Whatever happened next, he was certain that it would psychologically damaging, sexually confusing, and probably of the utmost importance to the national interests of the British Ministry of Magic. She was nice like that.

Great-great-grandfather Aloysius Benjamin Grimmelsby-Lovegood gave him what he supposed was a patient smile from the other side of the desk.

"Tea?"

"Please," Harry responded automatically.

Luna stood from his desk and busied herself with his electric kettle, leaving Harry to stare at what she claimed was her distant relative. The thick and, Harry bounced a foot on the grass just to be sure, healthy growth reminded him of something. He couldn't quite recall it, but right there on the tip of his tongue. He recalled reading about something like this. The honey-wood golem only made it worse. This was a special kind of weird that he _knew_ about, but what in the hell was it?

Luna turned back to him, steaming cup in hand, "And how do you take it?"

Distracted by the explanation for all of this which he could _just_ feel with his fingertips, he responded, "With honey, usual-"

Before he could take it back, she offered the cup to her distant relative, who slowly raised a hand and dripped the honey of the living dead directly into his cup. It was horrifying, Harry couldn't look away.

Then, deliberately, and with a twinkle in her eye, she passed the cup to him and resumed her former position. Her boots just slightly closer to the picture of his family.

She, and her esteemed ancestor, raised their cups to their lips, and drank. Suppressing confusion, and disgust, and horror, embracing his proud heritage rather, Harry raised his own cup to his lips and drank.

Oh.

**Oh.**

A tickle becomes a pain, becomes a suture-crack, becomes a cesarean gasp, and the third eye opens like a bullet hole obscenity. He groaned, leaning back in his chair. _**Insight.**_ Deep breaths, he needed deep breaths. _**Enlightenment hurts, Sweetling.**_

"Two days ago an enchantress in Taiwan used a ritual to force open a path into the world tree. She intends to use the old roads, the back paths that wind around the tree, to gain access to the keystone beneath Atlantis."

"How, ugh," with his head in his hands, Harry's voice came out hollow, "How do you know any of that, how… Why did you have to drug me to tell me that?"

"I didn't drug you. I initiated you. I need help, Harry Potter. There aren't many of us left that know those old paths, but that doesn't change the fact that it is vital that they not be used for access like this. The secret places of the earth should not be plundered, those vaults should not be explored. The roots of the world tree must stay safe, and solitary."

The buzzing in his head had only gotten louder, Harry could barely make out her words, but already he was beginning to understand them. It was insight, alright. He could feel the currents of power in the room, in a way he hadn't been able to since Neville's bachelor party with all those 'magic' mushrooms he cultivated. The old zombie glowed, he could see and feel it through his eyelids.

"Luna if you wanted to go out into the woods and get high, my birthday is in like two weeks. We could just have gone and done this then."

"We don't have much time," she said, standing up from his desk, and stepping around to him, "It is written: Bring not the uninitiated to walk on the sacred boughs."

Carding her hands through his messy hair she continued, "Matter is both wave and particle and let me tell you, Harry Potter, wave interference and cancellation is a messy business."

The old zombie looked on across these proceedings, interested but unaffected. Taking another sip of it's tea, finding it not to his taste, and dribbling more honey from his fingers into the mix, "Time… Is short… Grand daughter… We… Must be… About… Our dark… Work."

His gasping, oozing voice was just strange enough that it drilled through the pain and the consciousness-cracking awareness that Harry was cast adrift in. He followed it like a slippery anchor line back to the surface.

"Luna, how do you know all of this? Your last owl was from the Canadian Rockies, what were you even doing in Taiwan?"

Not stopping her calming ruffling of his hair, she replied, "Oh Harry, the initiated feel every intrusion onto the branches of the world tree as if they had been carved on themselves. It is no small thing to bore a hole through the bark of the great tree and attune one's self to the path they seek. But there are so few of us left. Now one more, I think."

She smiled down at him, though he didn't see, his eyes still closed and his head still in his hands.

Pulling him to his feet, she looped her arm into his and guided him up and forward, "Grandfather, I think the time is now."

Harry watched through his eye lids, he watched using his soul, as the long dead honey-man stood in slow creaking movements and walked to the nearest wall in his office. There, the power flowing through the wood of the man joined with the power that was suddenly flowing through the wood paneling of the wall. The movement was mesmerizing, he opened his eyes, allowing them to water as he saw a path open into an eternal spring. The grass at his feet was renewed again, the scents of flowers in their first bloom, the feel of trees with their leaves unfurled to the air for the first time, and the sound of buzzing, bees always busy in their service to the hive, sustaining the world around them. There was a bright light, a translucent hint of the honey comb, the load-bearing weave that underpinned the world they knew, holding it steady.

That's where he knew all of this from. The words, taken at the time from a book that hadn't even been in the Forbidden section, reached across the decades, echoing again in his head. The hollow earth, the world beneath, described by dozens of mad men and prophets, best known to the uninitiated by the old Norse tales of the hidden roads and trails that crisscrossed the world tree.

**Agartha.**

He knew now, old facts lining up with the sudden bursts of insight that still burst like fireworks across the inside of his skull, what this was.

Luna, patient and unrelenting, brought him alongside her as she walked toward the light. Grand Father Aloysius Benjamin Grimmelsby-Lovegood stepped ahead of them to the very edge of the honey comb membrane that separated them from the sweet buzzing heat of the other side. His movement more fluid the closer they came to the cusp, he raised a hand and caressed the line, his fingers suddenly dexterous and clever.

"Ah… As much as I love visiting you dear Grand daughter, I need to keep my place in the reflection of her great heat, where it shines here, at the edge of the world. It keeps me moving, even as I decompose," with a great sigh he hefted himself onto a protrusion from the wall.

He shifted in his seat, until the lines and whorls of his body met those of the wood around him. He blended into his surrounds suddenly, fit in place like he was part of the portal itself, even the exposed portion of his brain was covered by a short growth from the wall.

"It is my life to see you move through here, and one day I will die to keep you tied to your path."

Luna stood with him at the place where their world met another and became more, still assisting him.

"As it ever was Grand father. My love to Grandmother, I'll see you again soon."

His eyes were closed, and he idly waved them along the path. When his arm fell again to his side he fit fully into the wall, like he had never been separate in the first place.

Harry, shuffling and squinting against he light, and Luna, bushy-tailed and bright-eyed, passed through the veil.

Harry's perception of the world broke down, his mind unable to handle the information forwarded to it by his senses. He walked a path that was a road, but it was also a singular branch off a singular and titanic trunk, but it was also a great hand whose fingers twisted and moved him like a chip in the hands of a card shark, end-over-end, to-and-fro.

Around him he saw the reflections of divinity, lights too bright from the auras of creatures too Right to be witness by a degenerate mind, even one so kissed by the Deathly Hallows. They were back-lit against auras that were their equal and opposite, Wrong, cast as the moon, a perverse reflection of Rightness. Between them all walked beings that were guardians of the roads and the woods and the hand, Leschen, Dryads, SWAT officers, Tax men, clock-work automatons ten meters tall. They spaced the others, maintaining the distance and the integrity of the path.

They walked the path, passing through the veins of an infinitely greater being, an immaculate machine, and as Harry received a full-body lesson in synesthesia, a voice insinuated itself into his world.

_**Breathe, Sweetling. This too shall pass. Pains are relative, and this one will become very small, in time.**_

He blacked out.

* * *

**The Western Sea, Traveling Court of the Unseelie Aes Seidhe, The Good Ship Kraftwerks, Upper deck - Unknown Date**

There was a sensation of falling, a transition from the unreal/hyper-real world back to a physical one, the sensations falling away shocked him awake.

Beneath his feet the world seemed to sway side to side, but he was firmly anchored by Luna, who still held her arm in his.

He felt like his head had been dunked in a barrel of ice-water, a not unfamiliar feeling for anyone that had one drink too many at the Three Broomsticks. Madame Rosmerta was a harsh mistress, but she usually let up after one or two dunks. Harry was shivering in an instant, this was a constant thing.

Blinking the smoke and mirrors of that place, **Agartha**, out of his eyes, he got a proper look around. It was dark, and they stood on the upper deck of a wide ship. Lanterns were lit on the ends of all the yard arms, they reflected off the seas and lit up the folded sails underneath them. They rode in the midst of a great fleet, strung out single file in a line unbroken as it passed from the horizon behind them to the horizon in front. In the distance, ice bergs pierced the otherwise calm seas, their grating and crashing forming an atonal accompaniment to the thumping bass beat coming from below his feet.

"W-w-w-where a-are we?" he choked out, his teeth chattering all the way through.

Luna seemed unaffected by the cold, but her smile had changed. She was showing considerably more teeth.

"We're seeking help from the one group of people that could possibly get us to the lower branches of the tree faster than our Taiwanese friend. The only people that maintain outposts at that depth. You stand aboard The Good Ship Kraftwerks, palace-ship of a friend of mine."

"Fr-fr-friend?"

"Remember to bow deeper than anyone that bows to you, don't look anyone in the eyes if you can help it, and don't take anything that anyone offers you ever," she said, patting his hand, "but most importantly, don't be anything less than completely respectful to our hosts at all times. We stand in the great procession of the unseelie court, Harry Potter."

"Un-un-unseelie? F-f-fuck."

"Oh don't give them ideas, that won't end well for either of us. Now come along."

Harry gulped, fumbling his wand as he cast a warming charm over himself. They moved down some steps to the main deck, and Luna opened a door leading inward. They were welcomed by flashing lights and a deep electronic bass line. The dark elves were having a bit of a rave.

* * *

[A/N]: So here it is, the first of the chapters taking place in the past. This is a different Harry, he hasn't seen quite as much, his wife hasn't tried to kill him yet for one thing. I'll be telling these stories in parallel, hopefully in a way that is compelling. The chapters will jump back and forth, right now it seems like it'll be alternating but that may change as things develop.

I should also note that some of the ideas and details in this chapter, and likely the rest of these blasts to the past, are stolen from The Secret World, an excellent MMO from Funcom. It won't be a substantial crossover, but elements off the game's backstory were too close to the direction I was heading for me to not steal.

I hope you enjoy.

Before the Author's ramblings, this chapter weighs in at 4,666 words. As always, I welcome PMs and reviews.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

* * *

**Sigurd's Cradle, Padovan cluster, Freedom's Progress, Outskirts of capital settlement – 05.06.2185**

"Sooooooo, how's tricks?"

Hands clenched, knuckles whitened, teeth were ground, and then Jane took notice of Harry Potter's approach and began to react.

Harry and two very familiar and… perturbed… figures flanking him had made their way through the sprawling refugee off-loading effort to her position on the steps of the capitol building. The governor's square was the biggest open space they had inside city limits to coordinate relief efforts, at least while still taking advantage of existing colonial resources. It had been hours since Jane had assumed control of the alien vessel and cleared it out, traveling with her crew down through the ship to ensure it was powered, stable, and secure. Also so she did not have to even look at Harry or his ship again.

She had set up shop in a small crater on the steps, where they were still going through the pods that had been dragged out of the ship, ensuring each was empty and rescuing people wherever they could. The grand effort to actively pull people from the ship was slowly spinning up even now.

A lot of cases of sunburn, for some reason. Jane had a pretty good idea why.

"I wish you were dead."

"So do I luv, but if wishes were eezo cores, well, the migrant fleet would be a hell of a lot bigger."

Tali's simmering anger diverted briefly, "Hey!"

Looking over his shoulder at her, and taking in the aggressive postures of his favorite laborers, Harry visibly bit back his first response, "… well it would," turning back to Jane he continued, "But seriously! How's things! What do you need, we've been stocking supplies like good little doomsday preppers so we should be able to get you nearly anything you want."

Jane could clearly see Liara's eyes behind the man, and she could make some pretty reasonable conclusions about where Tali was looking based on how her nice, new helmet's faceplate was oriented. Their gazes seemed to be focused on the cracks in the paving stones, and the trails of burn marks where the ceramacrete of the building facade had ablated away, leaving slag and a nasty smell.

Briefly she looked to the hole she was in. A line of that same scarring they were looking at was traced through the ceramacrete that made up the whole plaza to the hole at her feet, which, on second examination, looked like it had been formed by an explosion. She had chosen for it's commanding view of the plaza, and for how it was flat enough for her to stack monitors and computer equipment lifted from inside the building. It was also just close enough to the building to run data lines, since they needed access closer to the crowds but were still having trouble with wireless for some reason.

Her eyes narrowing in suspicion, she asked, "What happened here?"

Harry smiled widely, "Trouble!"

Liara stepped past him, elbowing his side as she approached, "After sending the crew of the Normandy off with bits and pieces of his experiments, he wanted to combine everything he learned into one single ship because," she said grinding her teeth, "he was tired of facing landing invasion forces and wanted to try boarding parties for a change."

"The party is right there in the name, it has to be more fun than an invasion. Don't be mad at me because you spent the better part of two years telling me I was crazy and that everything would be fine! I told you, I told you all! If it wasn't some kind of jumped-up pillbugs it would have been the Turians again, or some of those weird d'suls you had me plant."

Forgetting her original point Liara turned around, pointing an accusing finger at Harry, "The d'sul is a hearty root which grows quickly and without significant chemical soil requirements, it is bio-compatible with the digestive systems of every race in the known galaxy save the Quarians and Turians, and it is a staple of Asari cuisine!"

Jane looked on, torn between frustration and curiosity. It was clear this was an old argument as Harry responded.

"That may well be, but by human reckoning it's scoville rating is a cool 2.5 million, which makes it a half-step away from being a chemical weapon. I wouldn't give one to a Krogan, and the bloody things look shifty, I'm telling you!"

The blue woman growled and stamped her foot, "Just because your voodoo makes stupid things like beets and turnips come alive doesn't mean everything works that way!"

Around the now-shouting argument, the rescue efforts fell to a standstill. Asari were enough of an oddity to attract attention in human space on their own, but seeing one shouting at a man about voodoo peppers was enough to offer a welcome distraction from the events of the day, which cast a very literal shadow over the Governor's Square in the light of the twin moons. Spotlights set up over the area cast brilliant circles onto the crowds of people still trying to get blankets, bottles of water, and teddy bears, but couldn't dispel the darkness cast by the massive ship that still stood over the city.

Jane clapped her hands, cutting across the argument to address the crowd, "ALRIGHT, SHOW'S OVER, GET MOVING! GET MOVING!"

A chastened Liara and an unrepentant Harry turned back to her.

"I'll ask again, what happened here?" she raised a single eyebrow as she stared the pair down.

Tali pushed through between them, an optical storage disk in-hand, "The truth is we don't know either. We started final preparations on the ship when the deep space comm arrays went down, and missed some of the stuff on the colony. The local government didn't do much more than send civilians into the shelters, but the Alliance outpost seemed to know something everyone else didn't. We've spent the last few hours combing through what was left of the outpost after the bugs ran through it. They were hiding disks with their sensor readings all over the base, this one," she said indicating the human behind her, "found an intact OSD beneath the backseat of an aircar."

"You can have that, I scanned it briefly after we found it," Harry said "They left the sensor readings unencrypted so anyone could get at it, but they did leave a brief video log under Alliance encryption."

Jane accepted the disk gingerly, "What, you couldn't crack it?"

"I could, but it's less illegal if I get a proper Alliance officer to unlock it for me," he said leadingly.

Almost against her will, she turned and plugged the disk into the console she had dragged out. The care and feeding of all their refugees/kidnapping victims could go on without her. They had virtually the full governments of six colonies on hand after all, even if some of them were still on ice. Somewhere out in the tumult of the crowd Ashley was helping distribute supplies, Jane would fill her in later.

The disk recognized the colonial system it was plugged into, she entered her command authorization and navigated into the drive. Alongside a CV for an Ivan Drekslaw, and a lot of tax of tax information for the same, were sensor logs and an encrypted video file. She hit play, and a window popped up revealing the face of the former Commander of the local garrison.

"This is Saul Sheoban, commander of the Alliance presence on Freedom's Progress. Pursuant to standing order omega-violet-four-three, I am declaring a Collector invasion of Freedom's Progress and the Padovan Sector. I will repeat, I am declaring a Collector Invasion of Freedom's Progress and the Padovan sector."

Through a frosted glass window behind him people were rushing around a crowded briefing room, files in hand and Omni-tools lit. The Commander, Saul, visibly released the steel from his spine. He seemed to lose three inches in his chair as he let the stress go from his frame.

"This makes us the fifth officially confirmed colony hit. I don't know why Earth is just letting this happen. I hated it before they were coming down on my men, and I'm sure I'll hate it after too. The decision to boost Alliance outreach to these bootstrappers out here isn't nearly enough. This should be splashed all over the news, we should be lobbying for Citadel aid, damn whatever those kitty-birds on the extranet say about the rebuil-."

An aide barged into the general's room, "Sir! The copy command is set and we've got Charlie waiting to act as runners, two minutes before the ship crosses into the atmosphere."

Saul waved the aide away, and as the door closed he looked back to the camera, "I've told my men enough for them to understand what is coming. I don't expect anyone to find this. I'm not better than Xhaing or Bart, and both of them have already gone down with their colonies. They would have had the same ideas I did, and we haven't seen any recordings of them. If you find this, we went down fighting. I've deployed my men with as hard of a bio-weapon block as I can arrange. I'm not going quietly. They'll need to build a new bunker to make this place look as barren as the last few. Hopefully these sensor logs are worth something. Sheoban out."

The sounds of the crowd filtered back in to the group as they took a moment to work through the message.

"We found and disarmed an explosive device he had readied beneath his bunker. Well," Tali said, her hands nervously clasping one another, "at least we can assume it was his bunker, there were more than a few dead soldiers and bugs, the frosted glass and office door fit, it explains his final message and the strange equipment the bugs brought with them…"

"Bringing construction equipment to a battlefield in advance is a bold move. Too bold. Fuck these guys, I'm going to kill them."

Jane looked up at him and scoffed, "You're just going to go kill them, you, your two conscripts-"

Liara made to interrupt with a, "Hey!", while Tali shrugged, but Jane ran right over them both, "You three and your singular cool ship are just going to go out from here with no legal authority to kill a race you've just heard of? How in the hell do you think you're going to do that?"

Harry smiled wide, some trick of the light making it seem sinister, "Simple. I know a few people, and I'm getting the band back together."

* * *

**Arcturus Stream, Arcturus System, Arcturus Station, Office of the Military Advisor to the Human Councilor – 05.11.2185**

David Anderson looked out of his window, and frowned.

The freighters passing through transit line Angels-3 Secondary were shifting off their path, again.

This fact upset him, because it meant that not only was another group of macro-transports heading to the Serpent Nebula cutting corners, again, but it also meant that the traffic controllers who he had chastised, chastised again in stronger terms, and then had replaced, were once again failing to corral their charges. He would never tell them that their job was easy, but he would demand that they do it.

He sighed.

That fact also upset him because it was yet another piece of evidence that he had been here, in this office, for far too long. He could chart the entire Angels traffic layer in his sleep. He had to stop himself from tracing them in dry erase markers at least once a week.

The death of the Citadel had spelled the death of a truly centralized galactic government. Oh the Citadel was still alive and kicking as a treaty organization and as an economic power, all that taxation and all those appropriations contracts couldn't just disappear over night. However, with communications interrupted by the central axis about which the relay comm system spun being shorted to the tune of a few tera-volts, there stopped being a good reason to keep everything out there in space when it could just as easily be back home. Operating expenses were lower there, after all, and with the Volus reigning their presence back in to Irune and Turian territory, banking expenses trended lower in home systems too.

The Asari councilor had been called back to Thessia first, then the Salarian Councilor had been called back to Surkesh, and with only Sparatus and Udina left floating through gravity-free hallways and meeting in former storage rooms, the whole thing had eventually been called off. The Citadel, which had boasted a population of more than 13 million, was now down to a rotating group of less than 500,000 scientists researchers, and contractors.

Repair estimates, something which typically didn't involve a giga-credit R&D component, were still only trailing upward. It had only been in the last eight months that politicians were waking up to the fact that they were better off building their own space station, or better yet series of space stations, rather than trying to repair something their galaxy-unifying forebears had failed to understand.

He had been here, in this office, acting as a military advisor to a man he couldn't stand the sight of, for more than nineteen months. He hated it.

But, and this lay at the core of his complaint with the traffic controller covering the Angels-3 traffic layer, as much as his job was hard he was still going to do it.

His intercom buzzed, drawing his gaze away from local traffic patterns, "Sir, I have Lieutenant Commander Jane Shepard on a voice only line for you, she is repeating a condition Omega-Violet-Four-Three, and I have verified that she has gone through her normal chain of command and has been debriefed already."

That was new. Tension he hadn't known he was still holding fell away. She was a protégé, a friend, and she had been among the first to disappear. Even after a year he still thought of her on his morning jogs around the station's 'Donut Lane' on the outer edge.

"Put her on," he was proud of how calm he sounded there, this was a voice he hadn't thought he would ever hear again reporting a status that he wasn't sure would ever make it through the inevitable comm blackout leading up to it.

"Lieutenant Commander?"

"Sir! I've been on the line for three and a half hours, you have no idea how glad I am to hear your voice."

He could almost taste the exasperation in her voice, it met the relief he felt in magnitude.

"It's… good to hear your voice as well. After P3W-451 I thought we lost you."

"You almost did sir. I've come to understand that we were one of the first colonies hit. After Alliance command picked up on the pattern and started pushing for local garrisons, the Collectors stopped trying so hard to take military prisoners."

His hands tightened into fists in his lap, he asked,, "Do you know how many-"

"I don't _know_ anything sir. We've been trying to put together the pieces from people's scattered memories. We have survivors, victims, from six colonies. We also have survivors from a LOT of random traffic. Command will have to look back at a lot of losses that were probably written off as piracy…"

"Jane, what happened over there? You've been off the grid for damn near two years."

"_Is that him?"_

_"Shut up!" _

He closed his mouth with a snap, a migraine making itself quietly known at his temple.

"Jane. How did you escape the Collectors?"

"_I want to talk to him, he knows me, c'mon!"_

_"I swear to god, Potter. If you don't step back I will shoot you. You don't need functional knee caps to fly this ship."_

_"You don't know that! This baby is full custom! Bespoke knee-based controllers for days!"_

_**BLAM!**_

"Sir," she continued in a bland voice, her tone not reflecting the gunshot or moaning he could hear in the background, "I regret to inform you that I have met Harry Potter again."

There it was.

"I…," Jane was audibly screwing up her courage, "I am requesting reassignment to act as a military advisor to Former Spectre Harry Potter-"

"_Hah! I knew you loved me! Ow goddamnit…"_

"He's… well… He's made something. The Alliance left him alone too long without a minder. He's got his own version of the Normandy sir, but enhanced by his pagan nonsense. It's… we need someone to reign him in, Sir."

David had his head in his hands, the migraine having spread from above his left eye across his whole brow, "Shepard, before his blood-magic on the Normandy completely faded two G7 technicians at Arcturus evaluated the ship, and one of them had to be entered into the psychiatric ward because he couldn't stop talking about the 'Gaunt Sigil', and how it stood exhausted but proud, groaning with purpose. Before they had to stop working, they determined that the structural steel not only had no effective upper limit on it's hardness or tensile strength, but also had some kind of regeneration factor."

"Yes sir."

"He's had two years out there."

Jane was silent, and he needed a moment to wrap his head around what she had just said. His imagination, a tool which only saw use these days in the creative phrasing of dispatches to try and aim the Human councilor in anything resembling a helpful direction, was running wild with ideas he didn't want to consider.

"This is much, much worse than that, isn't it?"

"Yes sir."

The headache was only getting worse. Taking a hand away from his head, he sent a quick message to his secretary, sending off for aspirin, or an anesthesiologist.

"Is First Sergeant Williams still…," David dropped off, afraid to finish his question. He would need to read her debriefing, and as great as hearing from her again was, they had lost a lot of good men. It wasn't the dregs of the service that they threw out into the unknown, she was proof of that.

"She is with me Sir. We both made it through."

"Good, very good," he let out another breath of relief.

This would have to be handled delicately. She wouldn't have described it as a version of the Normandy based on nothing. Humanity had a new goddamn problem, one whose picture might be found on the galactic codex next to the Human idiom 'Loose Cannon'. No wonder the buck had been passed up to him, regardless of his connection to her.

"I'll speak to the Admiralty. Consider yourself re-assigned immediately. We'll expect as consistent and immediate reporting as you can offer. If you can talk Mr. Potter into an Alliance drydock, I think I can arrange for a QEC."

"You know I'll do my best, Sir."

If he had the talent for it, he could have written an opera or painted a landscape based on her tone alone. The self-doubt, frustration, iron-hard discipline, and sense of duty, peppered by motes of disgust and fear.

"I know you will."

"I'll forward appropriate contact information your way as soon as I can… It is very good to hear your voice again Sir."

Injecting as much warmth in his voice as he possibly could, he responded, "God-speed, soldier."

He could hear that she understood how he felt, that she could feel the esteem with which he held her, "Thank you, Sir."

"Now, having said that, I do have a small favor to request on _his_ behalf…"

* * *

**Arcturus Stream, Arcturus System, Trans-Eunomia Gulf near the Mass Relay, SSV _Ryokinjono Tsukumogami – _05.13.2185**

"Freighter _Glorious Chest Muscles of Thundering Harsa, _this is the ninth time you have made transit into this system in error, and for the **last **time, we can read the irregularities in the signature of your drive core from here. You are in violation of the Citadel General Maintenance Statute, and are hereby ordered to heave to and submit to boarding."

Jeff Moreau honestly suspected that if he rolled his eyes any harder he would end up with detached retinas. Maybe if he had been born one of these too-dumb-to-live Batarian assholes he would have been in the clear there. Then again, they tended to kill children exhibiting genetic deviations as strong as his, so maybe he wouldn't.

Not that he let that fact color his professional interaction with these suicidal eezo bulk transports.

Definitely not.

"_If it's so damn important to you apes then you're welcome to come on board and re-calibrate my core connections yourself! But you'll do it in motion, this load is due at the Citadel in sixty hours, I don't have time for your bullshit today!"_

"That's… not how this works, _Glorious Chest Mus-"_

Turning away from the sensor reports on his view screen to the captain of the corvette that embodied his current sad state of affairs, he quickly asked, "Do I really have to say it every time? It's bad enough that I have to look at the massive Batarian tits he's got painted on the side of his ship, do I actually have to say it every single time?"

Captain Mira Seif of the _Ryokinjono Tsukumogami_ was unmoved by his plaintive tone, in fact she did not even look up from the tablet she was scrawling something on, "You do, and you know it. Get to it."

Joker sighed, and if slouching wouldn't put undue stress on a fairly critical portion of his spine, he would have done that too, "That's not how this works _Glorious Chest Muscles of Thundering Harsa, _you have been given your final warning as required by the Citadel Statute the last time you tried to make transit, 27 hours ago by my clock. We are no longer required to humor you. You will heave to and present yourself for boarding, or your ship will be disabled as a clear and present danger to yourself and all nearby relay traffic, and then boarded."

Based on attempts one through eight, Mr. Chest Muscles would get all silent and huffy for a while and then comply with their requests, or just turn his ship around and get the hell out of their system. Why these Batarians thought passing through Arcturus was a good idea, he would never know. It was both cheaper and faster to pass through Sol, transit duties here were at least 3% higher, and they still had to pay transit duties through Sol anyway.

You would think whichever idiot passed for a navigator over there would figure that out after attempt number four got them punted back into the Exodus Cluster, but nooooooooo. They were still here, interrupting what should have been prime 'sleeping with my eyes still open' time.

"_I've had just about the last of you sub-evolved apes hassling my legitimate business. Not everyone gets your fancy recommended maintenance, or all the parts to their engine attached like the diagrams say. You've already cost me half a million credits, I'm already going to be late, you'll-"_

"So do we get to actually fire, Boss Lady, or is this just going to be another shift with a bunch of Batarians shouting at me and no fun whatsoever?"

"So do we get to actually fire, **Captain**. If I wanted someone to call me boss lady I would have joined Uncle Hakim's construction business. I did not do that, I do not want that," she said, continuing to not look up to her pilot, "We are permitted a single shot off his bow if he moves more than 15,000 klicks from his designated course."

Joker sighed irritably, and tuned back in to today's fourth rant, "_-tra fees! Furthermore, I will be contacting my embassy and demanding that they get everyone in this sector fired. You'll be scrubbing recycling plants on your hands and knees for a century before you pay back my restitution! Do you hear me you inbred offspring of a blind lemur! I looked up what a lemur is just so I could shame you with one of your not-so-distant ancestors!"_

"Freighter _Glorious Chest Muscles of Thundering Harsa_, If you do not shut down your drive core and heave-to in the next," Joker broke in to the rant as he matched distances and speeds quickly, "four seconds, we have been authorized to fire."

"_You won't do it! I bet your guns don't even work!"_

"Three seconds."

"_Your ship is so small, what're you going to do, vent air at me?"_

"Two seconds"

"_I've made a decision, your tin can doesn't even count as a naval ship, I think you're actually two VIs in a converted storage cannister!"_

"Sweet Christ. Guns, just fire," Captain Seif said, still not looking up.

With great relish, Jeff Moreau turned and watched as the mechanical live-fire switch was pressed, and they took their one allowed shot. While the Batarian had been yammering away and their nearly-absent captain had been expressing her distaste, the weapons officer had been checking his field of fire and plotting his shot. A ferro-magnetic slug departed the _Ryoukinjono Tsukumogami_ at a cool 3,000 meters per second and, traveling across a virtually frictionless medium, it crossed the bow of the _Glorious Chest Muscles of Thundering Harsa_ in 10.254 seconds.

10.254 seconds was just enough time for Joker to ask, "Can we give'em the old razzle-dazzle?"

And for the captain to finally remove her gaze from her tablet to say, "Yeah. Why not."

The slug, having reached the venerable operational lifespan of 10.25385 seconds, encountered it's first real obstacle. That challenge took the form of a microsecond burst of coherent infra-red radiation fired from the GARDIAN arrays of it's parent ship.

The laser instantly heated the face of the slug, where fractionally differing thermal expansion coefficients across dozens of micro-scale imperfections on the surface and inside the body acted against each other, causing the slug to burst apart. A single pellet became a shotgun spread, the slug shedding it's black-on-black camouflage to glow incandescent against the backdrop of space.

Captain Seif got the visual she was looking for, the sudden and deadly firework in space, a cone of brilliance shooting across the bow of the latest idiotic aggressor, and she returned to her tablet.

"Ma'am, I'm reading some heat build-up in the mid-modules," came the call from the sensor tech at the rear of their cramped bridge.

"Different from the heating in the drive compartment then?" Joker snarked.

The tech made a frustrated noise, and replied, "Ma'am, these reading look almost like weapons warming."

"Isn't that interes-"

Seif was interrupted by the walls of the mid-ship storage containers of the Batarian ship flipping along their axis, revealing a pair of twin linked already-rotating autocannons. Thankfully of the two people in the cockpit zone, at least one had eyes on the freighter. Tracing his fingers along his display like a conductor stretching before a performance, Joker lit off their drive and fired their emergency reaction thrusters. The thrusters mixed miniscule amounts of trihydride tetrazine and hydrogen peroxide in a specially fortified chamber, and the resulting explosion slammed the ship onto a new course, and allowed them to 'duck' under the first shots from the freighter's improvised armaments.

The corvette's inertial compensators, even had they been set to an emergency readiness state, weren't up the task of cancelling out that much force applied _that_ quickly. The tablet in the Captain's hand leapt, it's screen shattering across her forehead, knocking her out in one clean blow. In the remainder of the cabin behind them a few coffee cups joined pens, papers, and other unsecured detritus on the roof. There was a sickening crack as an ensign who hadn't been belted in snapped their collarbone on a protrusion from the bulkhead above their station.

The compensator caught up almost immediately, not fast enough to have stopped the action but fast enough that everything came crashing right back down.

Before the ensign could even groan upon hitting the floor, Joker was off. The _Ryoukinjono Tsukumogami_ corkscrewed wildly through space, burning as hard as it could to get around the ship to it's reverse side. Fire from the autocannon thundered out, each shot invisible against the backdrop of space, but visible in the damage chewed into the bystanders in the transit line that had been behind them.

Joker was able to avoid the first salvo, and the first few follow-up shots, but when his wildly curving course brought the scattering civilian traffic lines past the forward viewscreens, he realized he couldn't let that much fire go freely into traffic. It wasn't like they could just take the hits personally either, Alliance corvettes weren't meant for much more than toll booth duty, they were thinly armored, thinly shielded, and had an especially cramped ten person crew compliment. The autocannon that their deceptively painted friend had aimed at them would chew through the canopy sections and vent the ship to space, the remaining crew were all still getting themselves back together after the emergency burn, no one had engaged battle alarms or configured the internal air-shields to stave off decompression.

Risking taking his hands of the wheel, Joker hit the alarms, and got the life support VI properly jumped into emergency mode. Before he could get his station back to full flight mode, the autocannon had caught up with them, piercing the shields and hull with contemptuous ease. Behind his air-shield he could see the same coffee tubes and papers that had just been thrown into the air being pulled around by the rapid flow of oxygen out of their crew compartment.

Joker shook his head and got back into the game, unable to deal with whatever took place behind him. If they all got to their decompression safe zones, great, getting shot up more because he diverted his attention again wouldn't help anyone. He had very limited controls over counter measures, and no control over guns, the weapons officer was probably still trying to stop the world from spinning, too busy to engage the _Glorious Chest Muscles of Thundering Harsa_ in return. He had been saved only by knowing the movement was coming, and his custom flight seat's back-up inertial compensation. He had never been more thankful for the allowances made for his stupid shitty bones.

Using what limited control he had, he dropped flares and popped what little ECM they had. Nothing he did stopped or even paused the incoming fire, the Batarian turrets were probably being aimed manually by the same jackass that had been sassing him earlier. Their corvette was a lot faster than the freighter, but not fast enough to beat it's ability to turn on-axis and keep them in the field of fire. The nearest back-up was minutes away, and it was everything Joker could do to stop them from springing more leaks.

What the fuck was a Batarian Q-ship doing out here anyway? In fact what were the Batarians even doing with Q-ships? Was this just a pissed off captain, pushed too far by basic maintenance standards, or were the Batarians trying someth-

Without warning the enemy guns fell silent, as Joker eased the ship around to get a better view of the situation he saw that the autocannons were now just so much space debris, and the engines on the _Glorious Chest Muscles of Thundering Harsa_ were utterly slagged, still glowing, radiating the waste heat of laser fire off into space.

Eclipsing the distant pale dot of the sun was a very familiar shape.

The Normandy.

What?

"Uhhh, SSV _Normandy_, please respond? Thank you for the assist."

The answering call raised more questions than it answered, expressed as it was by the dulcet tones of the one person he knew with a proper British accent, "Joker! Excellent! I was hoping that was you! I'm always willing to take shots at anything with a Batarian registry, but if it's in defense of a friend that just makes it all the sweeter!"

"Right," he responded, removing his cap and rubbing the back of his head. Turning his head, he really took in the damage behind him.

Everyone had either already been inside an air shield or had made it to a safe zone, but the reaction thrusters had done more damage than he had anticipated. The Captain was still bleeding, and the whole crew was still moaning and trying to get their heads on straight. The ensign had collapsed, trying not to agitate his break. Debris from their normal operation was scattered everywhere, and sparking wires from breached conduits made for interesting accent lights.

It even looked like the air frame of the ship had been bent a bit.

"You got a doctor on board, Boss-man?"

"Funny story about that!"

* * *

**Omega Nebula, Sahrabarik System, Omega Station – 05.14.2185**

"I don't like this."

"Oh, don't be such a cancelled stamp."

"There's a plague, the local weather forecast unironically says 'It's raining vorcha', and you read the Alliance intelligence report that the Big Three are banding together to assault a local vigilante."

As the airlock's outer door parted before them, Harry Potter, Jane Shepard, and Liara T'Soni were greeted by the free-est air in the galaxy. It smelled like strippers and vomit. Harry smiled.

What passed for customs and border enforcement on the largest functional space station in the known galaxy blinked it's four eyes, and offered to them as they passed, "You'll be wanting to see Aria."

Harry nodded knowingly and they made their way out into the station proper.

For anyone docking on the central level of Omega, coincidentally where anyone looking for actual docking clamps or not looking for a warehouse had to go, every path into the station leads directly to Afterlife, the nightclub/bar/brothel/occasional cock-fighting ring belonging to the de facto ruler of the station. Waves of mercenaries, slavers, and tourists such as they were, break across the entrance to the club before dispersing into the surrounding markets or transport hubs to do whatever dark work they called their own. This serves not only as a security measure, where piles of garbage and shoddy masonry hide surprisingly advanced sensors along the choke point leading to the club, but also a sort of pre-emptive dick-measuring contest on behalf of said de facto ruler. Anyone with any kind of significant business on the station could expect to wash up in Afterlife at the feet of Aria T'loak, one way or the other.

The irony of an undying man paying his respects at Afterlife kept Harry's smile up as they were waved past the line for the club. A familiar throbbing beat vibrated in their chests as they passed through the foyer into the club proper. Neon holograms and scantily clad Asari dancers abounded. Groups of uncomfortable looking mercs were jammed into booths next to equally uncomfortable clients all around the open central area and it's surrounding dance floor, which appeared to hold a tastefully curated crowd of attractive youths dancing to the beat.

They skirted around the bar and the dance floor, making their way to the rear of the club where they could apply for a short time slot in Aria's busy social calendar. A bare-faced Turian blocked their path, but was brushed out the way by a pair of hulking Krogan dragging an unconscious and bleeding Salarian between them into a back room. With a dirty look at their retreating backs, the Turian focused on the three people in front of him.

Harry held himself back from simply brushing past the Turian bouncer as well, and immediately regretted it, "She wants to see me."

"I'm sure. Who are you and what do you want?"

"Tell her I know where she keeps her dry cleaning, she'll know me."

"Do you have any idea how many people come to me saying 'Oh just tell her we took Spanish together', or 'It's about the tentacle wax, she'll know'? You know, she cut an arm off the last guy to come in and say 'It's about the taco stand, she'll remember me'."

Harry glanced at his companions, Liara was visibly steeling herself, trying to appear collected against the storm of stimulus inside the club, and Jane was properly affecting an uninterested look while caressing the grip of the pistol set in a reverse grip at her waist.

They had places to be.

"I'll take my chances," Harry said.

"On your head be it, Human," activating his omni-tool he sent some signal, and received confirmation. With a wordless gesture they were directed up the staircase to Aria's audience chamber.

Aria sat on her throne, elegantly positioned on an exquisite klixen leather sofa. It was said that Aria had gutted the beast herself, and the reason for it was displayed clearly by the Asari in a sexy maid outfit wiping blood from where it had pooled on the cushion. If klixen hide could resist the acid of thresher maws in their native environment, Salarian blood was hardly about to leave a stain.

She was affecting an air of regal disinterest, as befitted the pirate queen of Omega, deigning only to say, "When we last met I could have sworn I told you I never wanted to see your face again. My desires have not changed, but I am feeling gracious so I won't have you thrown out an airlock. Beat it, Human."

With an easy grin, Harry slipped onto the freshly disinfected stretch of cushioning, "What, right here? If you want a private show I'll let you know right now that I expect a generous tip."

As if she could feel the sheer weight of annoyance Harry was capable of delivering, or perhaps because she knew better than to risk bringing it down on herself, she rolled her eyes disgustedly and gave in, "What is it now?"

"I've only just heard that you have a rather famous doctor on-station. One who is perhaps a touch too qualified for your domain. I want him. I also hear you've got a vigilante problem, this fun little fellow have a _nom de guerre?"_

She opened her omni-tool with an irritated flick and initiated a file transfer, "Mordin Solus, he's fun, but honestly more trouble than he's worth, take him. Though I'll expect you to see his current project through to it's end," she looked over to him, steel in her gaze.

Ignoring the flare up of his own omni-tool, Harry acknowledged with a nod, "Fair enough, it's only a matter of time until your little viral issues jump species to the Asari after all. And your own personal Batman?"

Aria snorted, "He goes by the name Archangel, Turian by the look, but we've had a spate of people using armor mods to make themselves look like other species lately, so no one could prove it one way or the other. Whoever they are, they're good. Strategic hits, all ambushes and drop point seizures. They had a small crew, but rumor is a merc turned one of them and they got all but the Archangel himself in the resulting ambush. They've been making enemies across the board, and keeping the usual suspects in check, which is respectable in it's own right."

"Neat," standing, and rejoining his squaddies at the door, Harry made to leave, "Well I'll just grab my new doctor and be on my way then. Pleasure doing business with you once more."

Before he could exit, Aria called out to him, "It was real cute with the dry cleaning. You're dancing around the line of our agreement. Be sure you don't cross it, Potter."

"Aria, luv," he said, spreading his arms wide, "We couldn't betray each other if we tried."

Making their way back down into the thumping bass and smell of sweat and sleaze, Harry steered the group to a corner. Casting a short _muffliato_, he turned to his compatriots, "The good doctor, or our mysterious friend the Archangel?"

Jane, perching herself so that she could keep an eye on the crowd, answered, "Why do you even want this Archangel guy?"

"I like underdogs, and more than I like underdogs, I like anyone that can do more to disrupt sentient trafficking in nine months than C-Sec has done in forty years. You read your intel reports before you shared them, whoever it is has forty-eight hours at best before this recruiting push hits whatever critical mass it needs to roll over Archangel like a tidal wave," Harry said, nodding at the private room across the way, cordoned off by men in the colors of the Blue Suns, the Eclipse, and the Blood Pack, "I could use someone who knows how to lay a good ambush."

"Based off the report from Mother's friend from the Promenade, the plague isn't going to be going anywhere for a while yet. No one has made a serious effort at breaching quarantine, and for all her shabby glory, Aria has cordoned off the area well," Liara added.

"Cool. Archangel first, the good doctor after?"

At their nods, Harry led the group over to the merc recruiting station. They were grudgingly let in by the man wearing Blue Suns colors, only to find that the recruiting station seemed to totally be a Blues Suns operation. The Blood Pack and Eclipse outside seemed like window dressing for the 'unified front' they were putting up against the Archangel. With a few subtle compulsions charms they were each promised 500 credits at the end of the day, and given coordinates for the camp outside the Archangel's base of operations where the attack was in progress.

There was no way that Harry was letting some no-name merc punk drive him to an unknown third location. He had minions for that.

Jane took the wheel of a lightly used and only mildly stolen air car also flying the Blue Suns colors, and they headed in. As they coasted over the edge of the camp zone, heading in for a landing at the designated drop-off, Harry got a good look at the approach to Archangel's base. He reached one very important conclusion.

"Blimey, this looks like a lot of work."

Jane hmmmed agreement as she settled the air car down to the deck.

They stepped out into the enclosed hallways of the attacker's camp, and quietly found another corner to speak in. Other freelancers and a few Blood Pack Vorcha were firing assault rifles wildly down a hallway in the direction of the Archangel's approach, ostensibly keeping up a suppressive fire. As they watched, one of the vorcha took a shot to the head from a very high caliber rifle, and fell nearly headless behind the waist-high barrier it had been taking cover behind.

Harry looked on with mild interest, any rifle that could behead a Vorcha like that was worth keeping an eye on. This Archangel fellow had some pretty real firepower.

"What do you think? This looks like it could become a problem quickly."

Almost on his word a scuffle broke out between a group of other freelancers, and it grew to engulf the members of the Eclipse and Blue Suns who had come over to put a stop to it.

Looking at the corpse of the Vorcha in disgust, Liara swept her gaze over the area, "Sabotage? We could drop some grenades on timers on these barricades. If the Eclipse are here we can bet on some mechs in the area, with a deployment of this size they might have a few Ymir mechs with them."

Ever the voice of reason, Jane chimed in with, "As much as I don't want to fight dozens of pissed off mercenaries and gangsters, is setting modified grenades all across an active battlefield where we aren't known to, or necessarily friendly to, either group the best decision we could make? Particularly on a warehouse docking arm of the least up-to-code space station this side of Karshan?"

Her comments were well received, Harry and Liana looked thoughtful. They spent a moment really considering the implications of their actions, right up until an important looking Salarian came out of a cross-hallway to shout at the Eclipse punks who were still harassing a few members of the Blue Suns and the group of freelancers they were protecting.

"You aren't being paid to fight over freelancers, stand at the barricade or get back to unpacking the mechs, there's no need fo-"

As the Salarian took a single step into the central hallway another shot rang out, the projectile ricocheting off an overhead beam and a structural column to hit the Salarian right in the back of the head. Arterial blood and brain matter sprayed across Harry, Jane, and Liara, giving them all a fine green coat of paint.

As the member of the Eclipse rushed to the now-dead Salarian, grabbing the body and asking, "Jaroth?" in a weak voice, Harry wiped dead merc from his eyes.

"I am now the butt of someone else's joke. Someone I know. God _damn_ it, this won't stand," gesturing to his companions, he turned and begin making his way back to the air car. With a shared glance they exchanged very visible misgivings, and turned to follow their captain back the way they had come.

"Potter to Fortitude, Fortitude come in."

"This is the Fortitude, we've got you loud and clear boss-man, what's the score?"

"Fortitude, coordinate with Engineering and get me a damage assessment on this area and a life-signs scan. I want to know what would happen if this warehouse section were to undergo sudden decompression."

"Hold one, Boss."

The trio reached their air car and were sitting inside, at his unspoken insistence Harry was in the drivers seat. From the passenger side, Jane looked at the wizard with a furrowed brow and suspicion in her eyes.

"Harry."

Opening his door and struggling to pull something from his pocket, Harry said, "Yes dear?"

"What are you thinking about doing?"

"A bit of this, a bit of that. Maybe a curry for lunch. Remind me to kidnap Mess Sargent Gardner, would you? That man could really make a chicken vindaloo."

"No, I meant what are you thinking about doing right now?"

Liara looked over the back of the driver's seat in fascination at the strange shot-glass Harry pulled from his pocket and set on the ground. Jane was leaning over the central console of the air car, looking on with a considerably greater degree of concern. The volume of general gun fire in the background seemed to be picking up, and the sergeant in a Blue Suns uniform that had been at the landing site had disappeared. They were alone in what looked like on exceptionally dingy car park.

Rather than answer her question, Harry called over the radio again, "Any word, Fortitude?"

"Engineering insists that they are a ship-board engineer, not a civil engineer, and that these are totally different roles. In her words, 'You tell that bosh-tet that he could sever the whole docking arm if he its the wrong support beam.' I am directed to confirm your receipt of that message."

"Confirmed, Normandy. If, for the sake of argument, I was to ask engineering to highlight the support beams that I should avoid most strongly?"

Harry could read the sigh between his leading question and the reply, "Hold one, Boss."

"Harry," Jane said insistently, looking intently at the tiny device in his hand, "what are you thinking about doing right now?"

"_Engorgio_, Well, I was thinking. This whole thing looks like kind of a hassle, and there are a lot of mercs here that, honestly, I'm not terribly attached to. What if we set off a small bomb, not very big at all, and using the teaching of the late, great, Gustav Bloem, poked a bit of a hole in the station to let all the bad people out_? Engorgio_."

The shot glass became a soup bowl, and the soup bowl became a serving dish. With a few more spells the serving dish became a satellite dish, and the satellite dish became the size of their air car.

"That's not small, Harry."

"It started out quite small, and I've heard that the best things come from the smallest beginnings. _Engorgio_."

Liara's eyes were growing wider and wider with alarm, "Gustav Bloem is your Saphalia Rafii, isn't he? That's a shaped charge."

The cone had grown to roughly the size of the hallway that the mercs had been barricading, the edges of the confining tamper at the rear were digging into the cheap plasteel of the car park's floor, and the edges of the wide conical head were beginning to move parked air cars out of the way.

"It turns out that it's really easy to make a nearly perfect shaped charge at a small scale. Bespoke micro-scale production and machining leads to incredibly high quality, scale up is always the problem. _Engorgio. _I can kind of cheat my way around that."

"Fortitude to Potter, Boss, Engineering has input their best understanding into your safety system, which reports a green light if you rotate three degrees clockwise around your vertical. Also that you will need to get the hell out of there when you light that thing off."

"Noted Fortitude, if you would be so kind, see what kind of scans we can get on the clinic location and operational status of the good doctor. Our exit may be a bit rushed."

"Fortitude copies, will do Boss."

With the use of a few crude measuring charms, Harry made the required adjustments to his device, and motioned Jane and Liara back tot heir seats in the car.

With a grinning, "You'll want to buckle up, our landing might be rough," Harry pulled the car up and away.

As they curved out of the car park towards the sounds of a strained gunship engine and an intensifying firefight, Liara's eyes were still glued to the outline of the massive explosive charge they left behind, barely visible through the malfunctioning lighting and clutter of the landing zone.

Harry gunned the engines, heading around the immediate warehouse area to the relatively open skies surrounding the Archangel's last bastion. Dozens of bodies littered the Bridgeway between the camp they had been in and the building he controlled, from above the colors of the freelancer's armor mixed with Eclipse yellow and the traditional shade of Blue Suns blue to paint a macabre tribute to sentient anger and greed. A smoking gunship was pouring fire into the upper level of the building, an occasional shot of return fire lancing out to snap a piece off the hastily improvised armor covering the ship.

Harry came screaming down on the gunship from above, executing a tight vertical turn to slam the gunship with the belly of their car. The move slapped the ugly ship from the sky, it's kinetic barrier taking the brunt of the impact, sparking out in just enough time for it's airframe to pancake on the ground below.

The trio's air car was hardly unscathed. It hadn't been in great repair in the first place, and ramming maneuvers were basically guaranteed to invalidate the manufacturers warranty, even out in the terminus systems where such things were interpreted very loosely. On the engine's last legs, Harry crashed their car directly into the windows the gunship had been firing into.

Both crashes had knocked all three of the car's occupant's around, but having been warned by the maniacal laughter from the driver seat, everyone had braced enough for their armor systems to take the edge off the impact. Popping the front wind screen off, Harry jumped out of the wreckage, followed by Jane and a Liara that was rubbing her jaw.

In front of them a blue-suited Turian was firing a very familiar looking sniper rifle at a very high rate of fire into an open courtyard-like space, holding back a mass of screaming Vorcha with a combination of panache and projected lead. As they watched, every shot seemed to pierce through the horde trying to charge through a doorway on the lower level, drawing distinct lines of death through the crowd.

Harry took in in the new sights, shaking his head. A wizard's constitution was nothing to be ashamed of, and his own colorful history had lent him a bit more strength than most wizards could have boasted, had any been alive to make the claim. With a shrug, he pulled his pistol off the mag-lock at his thigh and added his own fire to the situation. As she reached her own equilibrium, Jane joined in. Liara, still unused to these kinds of efforts, sat on a broken chunk of masonry and continued to rub her jaw.

"So, Vakarian, how has life been treating you?"

The blue helmeted figure looked over, "The rifle?"

"I can think of a handful of small arms that can bounce a shot in the galaxy, and that shot was not performed by a Graal or a Kishock."

"Well," Garrus tightened his grip on the rifle and squeezed a shot out, bursting containment on a flamer unit and clearing the doorway with the resulting explosion, "You can't have it back. I researched Human gift-giving customs just in case, and I am declaring no take-backsies."

Beside Harry, Jane piped in with a smile, "You're a strange man, Garrus. But it is great to see you again."

Garrus looked away from his gun, meeting her eyes through the visor of his helmet and giving her a solid nod. More catching up could wait for later.

"Hey, so is there anything else you really need to do here? Anything pressing you want to take with you, for instance, or that you would mind being hit by a jet of near liquid, super-compressed copper? Just for the sake of argument, mind."

As the mass of Blood Pack troopers began boiling behind the dwindling firestorm, Garrus looked over to them, "That is suspiciously specific, but no. I got what I needed," ticking off his gauntleted talons, "You saw Jaroth, you just flattened Tarak, and Garm is down there somewhere, probably shouting and ruining someone else's day. Sounds like you have that covered though?"

Turning back to the incoming wave of Blood Pack mercs, he began firing again, "I do notice that you crashed your car, is there another exit?"

Harry walked over to the Turian and placed a hand on his shoulder, "Gather round kids, this one will be a little rough."

Jane rolled her eyes, but moved closer. With a rather forceful final step, she put her foot on top of Harry's and continued firing at the mass below them. Liara hopped to her feet and walked over.

As she put her hand on Harry's shoulder, she said, "Ooo med me bith muh tung!"

As he apparated away, Harry seriously wondered who programmed their translators to include a bitten-tongue lisp. What a dumb use of incredible talent. That thought prickled his subconscious as they all winked out of existence aboard Omega, and re-appeared just behind Joker in the cockpit of the Fortitude.

"JESUS Christ, warn a guy, Boss. You can't just appear in the cockpit with guns drawn like that, what if I had been doing something!"

Harry stepped away from a retching Asari and two intensely uncomfortable looking soldiers, "I believe in you! Why do you think I kidnapped you!"

"You got me transferred, that's not kidnapping."

"This is my pirate ship, I am the Captain, and if I say you were kidnapped, you were kidnapped!" Harry returned in a childish tone.

Spinning on his heel he turned to Garrus, who was just unhooking and removing his helmet, "Tell you what, I stole your kill on that Tarak fellow," he brandished a detonator which blinked the insistent red of 'Armed', "Hows about you take care of Garm and we call it even?"

The Turian stood stock-still for a moment, his mandibles flexing as he came to terms with the radical change in his circumstances, "I probably should have called you, shouldn't I?"

Harry took a moment and wiped the mild mania he had been channeling all afternoon from his face, "I'm good for more than bespoke weapons manufacturing, you know."

Huffing a laugh, "Yeah, you might be at that," nodding to the detonator still outstretched in his hand, "Will it be good?"

Without turning Harry said, "Joker, if you would be so kind as to point the forward cameras at our former position."

"Roger."

Garrus took the blinking box from Harry's hand, and stepped around him to get a better look at the displays across the front of the cockpit. Joker obligingly opened additional panels and set the viewscreens to 'cinematic'. Liara spat a bit of purple into a handkerchief rescued from a pocket in her armor, and did the same. Coming up behind him, Jane put her own hand on the Turian's shoulder in solidarity. Without ceremony, Garrus depressed the button.

The Fortitude had undocked from the station while the team had been off gallivanting around, and now lay stationary relative to the warehouse they had been occupying, a few thousand kilometers away. As the detonator activated, they watched a column of fire and debris blossom from the side of the arm. Harry's shaped charge had blasted a hole clean through the side of the whole structure, carrying a few thousand tons of debris and the bodies of hundreds of dead and now dying mercenaries, in one move gutting the active-duty manpower of the Terminus system's most significant chapters of the Big Three.

Harry let the moment rest for a second. He could see Garrus' jaw clench as they watched what use to be his hideout coast out into space, bits and pieces already being caught by the automated harbor-tending craft that constantly fought the losing battle against trash in the crowded space lanes of Omega.

"So, who wants to help me kidnap a war criminal and cure a plague?"

Garuss didn't turn from the view, but Liara did, giving him a dirty look. Jane sighed. She gave Garrus' shoulder a squeeze before turning around and moving back to Harry's side.

"Joker, you got the location of the good doctor? I need a vector."

"I'll do you one better Boss, vector information should be coming up on your HUD shortly."

"Good enough. Jane, my dear," Harry said, offering his arm.

Jane gamely folded her arm into his proffered one, "You never mentioned he was a war criminal."

Harry cast a point me and a few measurement charms, verifying the precise coordinates in front of his eyes, "I don't bring up every war crimes tribunal I've been a part of, it's just not something that comes up in polite conversation."

"It should have come up in the pre-mission briefing, or on the flight over, or during any of the discussions that brought us to this sector of space," she returned, squeezing his arm with all the strength special forces training and a good suit exo-skeleton could offer, "just like the fact that you have shaped charges on you at all times, and the ability to make them the size of an APC without compromising functionality."

Harry gulped, "Yeah, come to think of it, I probably should have mentioned that. In fairness I can't remember everything all the time, it just comes to me, I'm flighty!" he paled at the glares coming his way, "It's part of my charm?"

There were long, probably _pointed_ conversations to be held in his near future, he could tell. Ugh.

"Well this be will be easy, actually according to plan, smash and grab, in and out, five minutes."

Somehow the grip around his arm tightened. She probably wasn't buying it. With one last look at Garrus, who was still staring blankly out the viewscreens at the spreading debris field, Harry twisted the pair of them through space to a landing in front of a neon-pink holographic sign that read simply 'CLINIC', set against a cross and an arrow indicating down the hall.

A quick walk down a poorly lit hallway brought them to a security checkpoint where a Human security guard spotted them immediately, "No funny business once you're in the clinic, unless you want to deal with the mechs."

Harry and Jane, who was still holding his arm in a crushing grip, gave the indicated Loki-style mech a professional once over. Despite nominally being from the same manufacturer as the more standard fare they could find in any given Eclipse camp, these looked a cut above. Their necks didn't give that slight tooth-grinding whine, and it look like someone had performed maintenance on them recently, and actually meant it.

They passed through the checkpoint to the clinic proper, where two harassed looking nurses gave them a once over. No active bleeding, minor bruising, intact armor, and visible weapons? Not actively brandishing said weapons?

The closer nurse opened with, "Mordin's around here somewhere, go talk to him. We can use all the help we can get."

With a bemused look Harry said, "How do you know we're here to help?"

The Nurse's face tightened, "If you weren't here to help, Mordin is still around here somewhere, and you would still end up speaking to him."

"Fair enough," Harry said with a calming wave, and they moved deeper into the clinic.

There wasn't much space in the place, which was a blessing. The less searching they had to do to find their target, the better. The clinic was clean, and as well-lit as it got on Omega, but it was clear that the plague in this sector had already taken a toll. Between damage caused by the pathogen, and damage caused by the infinitely more common looter, there were bodies in various states of disrepair spread throughout. As they passed by, a Turian laid out on a stretcher reached out and snagged Jane's wrist.

"He saved me!" the Turian said, eyes rolling and mandibles splayed out in the characteristic signs of a Turian high off his ass on painkillers, "I owe him anything! Everything!"

Jane let go of Harry, prompting a sigh of relief from the man, and tentatively took the Turian's hand off her own. Gingerly she lifted the sheet covering his torso, revealing that he had been shot six times, in a line across his chest, each puncture had been expertly sealed and dressed.

"A war criminal, huh? Just what kind of tribunal was this?"

Turning back to Harry she caught the grim look on his face as he stared at the slowly healing wounds, "I'll show you. You'll wish you hadn't seen it, but I'll show it to you. Later though. Either trust me enough to follow me through this, or respect me enough to do what I say, but lets go."

Dropping the sheet, Jane lifted her hands in a gesture of surrender. Harry was a son of a bitch, but he'd earned enough credit for her to stand by and see how this played out. She would be sure to remind him later to not keep his cards so close to the vest, but it was clear that he'd been affected by the sights and sounds of the clinic as well.

They continued on through, until they heard raised voices coming out of a room at the end of a hall.

A Human male called out, "Professor! We're running low on Cipoxidin."

Only to be answered by a male Salarian, "Use Malanarin. Plenty on Hand. Almost as good. Cause cramping in Batarians. Supplement with Butemerol."

"Malanarin and Butemerol, got it."

Harry brightened, the mania of twenty minutes ago seeping back into his manner. A human left the room, not looking up from the inventory list in his hands, they stepped around him as he rushed down the hall. Entering the room they found a Salarian in a red and white reinforced lab coat pacing, debating some kind of chemical exchange with himself.

"Professor Mordin Solus?"

The man in question looked up at their approach, and met them before they could enter too deeply into his lab space, "Humans. Curious. Don't recognize you from the area. Too well armed to be refugees. No mercenary uniforms. Quarantine still in effect."

He turned away from them, heading to a few pieces of active equipment on a side bench, "Here for something else. Vorcha? Crew to clean them out? Unlikely, Vorcha a symptom, not a cause," turning off the equipment, he proceeded to the other side of the room to apparently do more of the same, "The plague? Investigating possible use as a bio-weapon? Too many guns, not enough data equipment. Soldiers, not scientists."

At that, Harry cut in, "Relax, Mordin. We're here because Aria and I have an understanding, and she'd like this whole plague thing taken care of before some one breaches quarantine and it begins to affect business."

"Interest of Aria understandable. Intervention of Aria unlikely. Surprised she would make any effort to assist," Mordin said, finally turning back to them after shutting down all of the equipment in the room.

"We have a special arrangement, and frankly I like helping the little guys," with a smile Harry continued, "Do you have a solution to our little viral issue?"

Lighting off his omni-tool, Mordin said, "Already have a cure. Need to distribute it at environmental control center. Vorcha guarding it. Need to kill them. Too busy here at clinic to have already done it."

"I can take care of it," Harry stated with confidence.

As the words left his mouth the light dimmed, and the background hum and rattle of the room's ventilator died off.

"Vorcha have shut down environmental systems. Trying to kill everyone. Need to get power back on before district suffocates!" Mordin said in a rush. Well, he said everything in a rush, but with the shutting off of life support he grew more frantic.

Raising his hands in front of him, Harry said, "Calm down! Calm down! I can handle it. Pass me the cure and the two of us will be there in a jiff."

Taking a deep breath, Mordin did just that, indicating a small vial on his bench and offering an omni-tool dispersion profile meant for interface into the environmental control system.

"Excellent. Too much to do here in clinic. Have to look after patients!"

Harry nodded, and rubbed at his jaw, "Good to hear, I'll have to see if I can guilt a few friends of mine into coming out here and helping out. One last thing, Doctor."

Mordin had already turned away, his attention somewhere else, "Yes?"

"Fortak sends his regards."

The Doctor froze for an instant, before his hands moved directly to the gun at his waist. Before he had gotten halfway to raising it, Harry had him stunned. With a flick he transfigured the doctor into a tin of Spam, helpfully marked by a bright green label that proclaimed, 'Now with a hint of Salarian!'.

Harry walked over and picked up the tin, tossing it between his hands before shoving it into a pocket on his armor in which it shouldn't have been able to fit.

From where she stood next to the doorway to the room, unmoved by frantic Salarians or the causal violation of reality, Jane asked, "Fortak?"

"An old friend. Both in the sense that I've known him for a while, and in the sense of that fucker being as old as dirt."

"That's an interesting name. Could be Batarian, could be from one of those fringe Volus colonies. Most of them use family or clan names though. It could also be Krogan."

Taking his own fortifying breath, and giving the now empty lab a second look through, Harry said, "You don't have to be coy, I know you have reports to make. Mordin here should be one of the last links in a few plans, so it's safe to share a bit. Fortak would never admit to it, but the man is the Krogan Da'Vinci. Officially he's a weapons scientist and engineer, but, well, did you know that Krogan basically don't die of natural causes? They just get older and meaner until some young buck, or particularly angry thresher maw, finally get the better of them. Fortak has been alive since well before the genophage, and you don't get that old by being stupid."

"And how did you meet what has to be the oldest Krogan alive?"

"Two things," Harry said as he picked up the plague cure from where it at on Mordin's lab bench, "One, he's nowhere near the oldest Krogan alive, at least I'm pretty sure. And two, not all Krogan are brain-dead heaps of muscle. Some of them could spot a trend, see where their culture and species would go following what amounted to forced sterilization. A couple spread feelers out into the galaxy, seeds dropped by generations of Krogan mercs who went out to live the blood rage. I got caught by one of those seeds, and we became pen pals," Harry held the cure up to the light, peering through it, "But we've also got work to do, we can play twenty questions when we get the air back on and this little miracle circulating through the sector."

* * *

**Krogan Demilitarized Zone, Aralakh System, Tuchanka, Unnamed Capitol Settlement – 05.16.2185**

"Powerlord Urdnot Wrex! My god man, you look younger every time I see you!"

Harry shouted, with a smile on his face, as their party entered the throne room of his good friend and the preeminent warlord of their time. Despite the traditional wisdom that one should minimize their ground presence on Tuchanka, and that they should limit the number of council species they brought along with them, the whole crew was there. Jane helpfully bringing up the rear, and keeping an aggressive eye on the small crowd that had formed and was following them from the space port.

When the whole troupe had properly entered the room, and a pair of particularly large Krogan in a strange livery that she had never seen before barred entry behind them, she turned from the rear-guard and gave the room a look.

She could see Harry Potter's god damned finger prints all over it.

Wrex, that wily old bastard, was sat upon a gigantic throne whose presence overpowered the room. It stood at the top of a set of stone steps, and looked like a titanic slab of obsidian, trilliant cut, with a chair cut straight into it. The only feature of the chair, the single thing keeping it from perfect symmetry, was a cut out on the right arm rest for a shotgun to be set.

The rest of the room was new, and spotless. She'd seen Tuchanka from orbit, and she'd seen pieces of it on the way down. Krogan architecture ran the gamut from more engineered structures with struts, columns, and supports, to what might be called brutalist architecture. Whatever new world order Harry and Wrex had concocted was clearly leaning more toward brutalism. The room was well lit, but it was also massive, open, and filled with flat ceramacrete planes. Inset lights and ventilators gave the false appearance of window openings at the edges of the ceiling.

"Human. I see Turian, Asari, and Quarian with you too. You are not supposed to show your face here until unless you've got a Salarian with you in there somewhere," leaning out from where he had been reclining against his throne, he pointed an accusing finger and smiled, "You're not turning your back on our covenant, are you?"

"You wound me sir!" good god, Potter was hamming it up, "I have, right here in this very pocket, the architect of the renewed genophage!"

They had come into Wrex's apparent throne room during what appeared to be normal business hours. There were rows of ceramacrete chairs, lesser than the great throne but still significant in comparison to the otherwise flat and unforgiving ground. Maybe ten Krogan in widely differing armors were sat in them, each a small island separate from the others, and each surrounded by assistants or functionaries in similar garb. The whole group, forty or fifty Krogan in all, hissed and booed in what felt like a ritual manner.

"Bring him out, Human. The Krogan have some business with this Salarian."

At that, the Krogan in the chairs began laughing, and a large Krogan in some new and concealing form of dress came out from around the Great Throne, exiting some hidden room to walk to Wrex's side.

Harry removed the can of spam from his pocket, displaying it in his palm to the Powerlord and his retinue, only making them laugh harder. He set it down on the floor, taking care to position it just so. Brandishing his wand, the wizard transfigured the can back into a concerned and decisively acting Doctor Mordin Solus, whose gun was promptly plucked from his fingers.

The doctor took a quick step away from the wizard, disoriented by the change and even more by the disarming. Taking deep breaths and with wide eyes, he took in his surroundings.

"Clan Drau. Clan Nakmor. Thax. Wik. Weyrloc. Kariss. Jurdon? Unexpected," as Morin finally turned and looked up to the Great Throne and it's occupant, he continued, "Urdnot Wrex. Exploits well known. Could have ascended to headship of Clan Urdnot. Chose not to, following betrayal by father. Good candidate for wider scale Krogan leadership. Clearly successful in some capacity."

Wrex stood from his throne, and descended a few steps toward the floor, "Allow me to present to you, my council, Mordin Solus. A genius geneticist, a notable professor, holder of multiple doctorate degrees, and by all accounts a fair singer," the chuckling continued, and Wrex gave another wide and horrific Krogan smile, "He saw before even our shamans did that the Krogan were finally beginning to overcome our neutering, and secure in the belief that we are the monsters his people so dimly remember from the rebellion, he devised a new genophage and began it's deployment himself. Three thousand kilometers from here, near the Torrash Scar."

From next to the Great Throne the late comer spoke up in a softer voice, "He was right."

Jane was surprised, and while her training kept that surprise from coming out in the form of a gasp or even the raising of an eyebrow, her crewmates weren't so disciplined. They had all probabaly been working under the same assumptions that she had been up to this point, that Krogans were all sort-of pod people, and that Krogan females were like girlfriends from Thessia or Neo-Nigerian princes, they weren't real. Intellectually she knew of their existence, but hearing one speak and seeing one step down from a position of high honor on the Great Throne's dais behind Wrex was strange and new.

As she arrived again at Wrex's side, placing her hand upon his shoulder, she said, "He was right. We weren't ready. We weren't ready when the Salarians uplifted our people to fight their war with the Rachni, we weren't ready for space, and we weren't ready to coexist with each other, to say nothing of soft and opinionated aliens."

Wrex continued her thought, "But now, here, where we shed blood together, and where we set in stone the foundation of our new covenant, our great Union, that is no longer true. And our small friend here will be the end of the old ways, and the beginning of the new."

Mordin stood to the side, halfway between the chairs of Wrex's council and the first step to the Great Throne. He held his hands at his side, and while Wrex and his companion spoke, he had been examining the room and the Krogan filling it, just as Jane had been.

It had definitely taken her a bit of time to catch the details. Krogan cuniform traced the bottom edges of all the walls, from the translations supplied by her implants she gathered that it was likely the basis of this Union. Clans were named, rights were established, and most importantly the delineation and authorization for doing violence seemed to be set out in pretty clear language. The Krogan were building themselves a culture. The guards at the door wore uniforms in colors that mixed those of all the clans present, at least in some small way, and the sigils on their shoulders and on their chests were representative of the Great Throne, a triangle representing it's shape with a line bisecting it through the center.

Mordin saw it as she did. She made note of it all so she could write another stunning report for her superiors, she was sure that if she had any less support from on high she'd have been drug tested and brought up on charges. He was making note of it all and, and if the records and depositions she had read were true, he was probably revising his own estimates.

This _could_ all be faked. Maybe.

She wasn't exactly an expert on Krogan genetics or culture, the good doctor was far closer to that, but even she could tell that the crowd in front of her were each from different lands. The wear on their armor, the way they held their gear, the scarring on their crests, and even the paint on their humps. All that while saying nothing about faking the precise appearances of the clan leaders themselves.

It would be very, very difficult to get these people into this room together without a lot having happened leading to this moment.

Ashley and Tali were somewhat awestruck by what they were seeing, the last they had seen of the big guy was Harry giving him his parting gift, the Boom Stick, and him taking a shuttle down for the planet. Garrus and Liara had a better idea of what they were actually seeing, of what had taken place here, and they both seemed even more blown away for it.

"So, Punk. You're ahead of schedule. There's more work to be done here, more… heh… Unity… to be spread," at that, the chuckling amongst the council continued again, "Our job was to handle the work within, your job was to handle the work without. You have more work to do before our covenant is complete. Why are you here?"

At that, the chuckling settled, and attention shifted back to the wizard. Harry rubbed the back of his neck and looked a bit sheepish, "Something a bit personal came up. The collectors have been coming to our side of the Omega-4 relay, and they've been taking humans back with them by the hundreds of thousands. They attacked my land, ruined another one of my farms, and long story short, I could use a bit of muscle. I was hoping you had a few enterprising young lads who could use some experience abroad?"

Wrex gave another one of his terrifying smiles, "Now, now, Human. That wasn't the deal we struck. You can't call on Tuchanka for assistance until our covenant is complete."

Taking his time, Wrex crossed to Mordin and rested a huge hand on his small amphibian shoulder, "You're ahead of schedule, though. I suppose we can meet you halfway. As we clean house, we've been running down old leads. We thought for years that Warlord Okeer had come crawling back here, and had set up his shop again in some lost corner of the planet. We tracked him and his new gene engineering program off planet. Go do your thing, I'm sure you can find something to help you there."

"Better than I had hoped for. I'll take it. You'll give my love to old Fortak? He's doing well?"

"More angry than I've ever seen him. He's busy planning utilities layouts for the hospitals for the workers for the factory for his latest tomkah mounted weapon design," Wrex shook his head fondly, "The best gunsmith we've ever had."

* * *

**Eagle Nebula, Imir System, Korlus – 05.18.2185**

Aboard the Fortitude, in orbit over Korlus, with the blood of scores more Blue Suns on his hands and dozens of Krogan too young and inexperienced to even understand what had happened, Harry Potter got a call. He took his head from where it was pressed against the glass of one of the biological containment tanks filling the room to call up to the cockpit, "Joker, set a course for the Iera system, Shadow Sea cluster. Horizon's gone dark."

* * *

[A/N]: Here, finally, is chapter three. I hope you enjoyed it!

Based on the reviews, my last chapter was not especially well received. That's fair, though I will say that I warned you that it would be different. I have this thing in mind for how the overall story will go, and it is a very real possibility that what I have in mind is bad. I'll ask you all to bear with me for a bit. If it's especially bad, and I'll probably be the first one to know on that mark, I can re-organize things and split things away into different stories. For now though, I will ask for your patience.

As far as this chapter, I have a LOT of story ground to cover here, and I'd like to do so in a way that expresses what I want without being exhaustive. I think the jumps here do it well enough, hopefully keeping things a bit fresh. Changes to cannon are propagating forward, we get some more implications about what exactly it is that Harry does with his free time. I really do hope you like it.

You may note that the description of the story has changed. In writing this chapter I had to review a lot of plans and notes, changing where I initially thought this would go. The new description should be more in line with the actual story.

Before the author's ramblings, this chapter weighs in at 13,438 words. I welcome all reviews and PMs, though you get more points if your comments are constructive in nature.


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